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On 5 December 2018, the pro-life Christian web site LifeSite reported that social media giant Facebook had censored an image of Santa Claus kneeling reverently before the baby Jesus because the illustration was deemed 'violent content': The following day, LifeSite reported that Facebook had since removed the covering message that warned users about violent or graphic content. Asserting that the image was censored was quite an exaggeration (aside from the fact that Facebook is not a government entity), given that it was neither deleted nor restricted in a way such that ordinary Facebook users could no longer view it. It was simply covered with a warning message that a user had to click on to see the underlying picture: And LifeSite's own story noted, that particular illustration had already been present on Facebook for over three years: In other words, as of this writing the image had been readily viewable Facebook for three years, with only a very brief interruption to that status on the platform. It's exceedingly improbable that anyone truly thought the illustration was violent or graphic or that Facebook deliberately chose to place a warning message on it. As the company confirmed to us, it was automated systems that mistakenly applied a warning screen to this image, a process that can be triggered by users (either mistakenly or prankishly) flagging an image as offensive. Facebook told us that the warning screen was removed as soon as we identified the mistake. In early December 2020, readers directed our attention to a post containing the image, which was made in 2015. The image was covered with a message that it contains sensitive content, and viewers must click on it to see the image. The warning label was removed, however, after we contacted Facebook asking why it was there. A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed in an email to Snopes that the label applied to the image was an error.
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