Facebook Removes Advertisements for Professor’s Book Critiquing ‘Toxic Femininity’

A sign at the entrance to Facebook's corporate headquarters location in Menlo Park, Calif., on March 21, 2018. Joseh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Facebook recently removed advertisements for a book critiquing a radical form of feminism, claiming the book didn’t comply with its policies.

A message to Guadalupe Gifts, a Catholic gift store, showed that the company rejected the ads for “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing The Culture From Toxic Femininity,” while citing a set of rules for what products can be sold or advertised on Facebook.

In an email, Facebook told the gift store that “listings may not promote the buying, selling, or use of adult products,” the College Fix reported.

The store “tried to post the book on both those platforms and got the same message—that the book violated community policy,” author Carrie Gress told the website, referring to Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.

Facebook’s rules state that listings can’t promote adult products.

Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company also hasn’t responded to requests from other outlets about the matter.

“Facebook eventually did get back to the book sellers and said there was a ‘glitch’ in the algorithm,” Gress said on Breitbart News Saturday. “If it were an isolated case, I wouldn’t give it all a second thought, but there seem to be a lot of glitches in algorithms, with it affecting a lot more Catholic products than just mine.”

In a blog post on Guadalupe Gifts’s website, owner Juan-Carlos Valerio is cited as saying it’s uncertain whether the censorship of the posts was intentional.

“Though Valerio noted that it was strange that Facebook and Instagram blocked Gress’s book three months after it had already been posted, he didn’t think there was enough evidence that the book had been specifically targeted, and was going through the proper channels to get it reinstated,” the post stated.

Gress told Breitbart that she has seen support for the book grow as a result of the actions taken against her by Facebook. She also cited apparent glitches on Amazon concerning the book’s listing there.

“I think we will continue to see more of this and a real pattern will emerge,” she said. “People want to do something, anything to fight this Big Tech monopoly that we all feel like we are living under, so it is a great moment for people with fresh ideas to start building.”

“The Anti-Mary Exposed” posits that a small group of “elite American women” in the 1960s convinced an overwhelming majority of the country that destroying the most fundamental of relationships—that of mother and child—was necessary for women to have productive and happy lives.

“Building off the scriptural foundations of the anti-Christ, Carrie Gress makes an in-depth investigation into the idea of an anti-Mary—as a spirit, not an individual—that has plagued the West since the ’60s. Misleading generations of women, this anti-Marian spirit has led to the toxic femininity that has destroyed the lives of countless men, women, and children,” its description states.