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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

March 16, 2015 | 2 min read

Facebook has updated to its community standards to help guide users what is acceptable to share on the website.

The social network, which has 1.39 billion global users, set out to define the processes in which it bans content which breach its ‘nudity’ or ‘hate speech’ rules to increase the transparency of its banning process.

A post from the company on Monday co-written by Monika Bickert, head of global policy management, and Chris Sonderby, Facebook's deputy general counsel, read: “It’s a challenge to maintain one set of standards that meets the needs of a diverse global community.

"People from different backgrounds may have different ideas about what’s appropriate to share - a video posted as a joke by one person might be upsetting to someone else, but it may not violate our standards.

It concluded: "We know that our policies won’t perfectly address every piece of content, especially where we have limited context, but we evaluate reported content seriously and do our best to get it right.”

Bickert also expanded on what Facebook defines as nudity for the New York Times: “We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks."

Commenting on the fact that the site bans images of the female breast if the nipple is visible, Bickert added, “but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breast-feeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring”.

Earlier this month, a French court ruled that a man who posted a famous artwork of a vagina could sue the company for banning his account.

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