To: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms, Inc., Meta Policy & Safety Team, and the Meta Oversight Board

The problem
Facebook and Instagram have become important spaces for writers, poets, readers, artists, and cultural communities to share and discuss literature.

But automated moderation does not always distinguish between literary expression and the type of content a platform's rules are designed to restrict.

A poem may describe desire.
A novel may contain an erotic passage.
A classical text may use explicit language.
A literary critic may quote a sexual passage in order to analyze it.

These uses are fundamentally different from sexual solicitation or commercial sexual content.

Yet when moderation systems focus heavily on the words contained in a post without adequately recognizing its context, legitimate literary and cultural expression can be removed, restricted, or associated with violations that have nothing to do with the purpose of the work.

This creates a serious problem for literature on social media: writers are increasingly forced to choose between expressing a text faithfully and avoiding the possibility of automated enforcement.

Why this matters?
Literature has always dealt with subjects that are uncomfortable, intimate, controversial, or explicit.

Sexuality, the body, violence, death, desire, abuse, and other mature subjects are not inventions of social media. They are part of centuries of world literature and artistic expression.

A platform does not have to allow everything in order to protect literature.

It simply needs to distinguish between what a text contains and what the person posting it is doing with that text.

A literary quotation is not necessarily an invitation to sexual activity.

An erotic poem is not necessarily sexual solicitation.

A discussion of an explicit novel is not the same thing as distributing pornography.

A historical or cultural text does not cease to be culturally significant because it contains language that a modern automated system considers sensitive.

What we are asking Meta to do?
We call on Meta to introduce stronger contextual protections for literary, artistic, educational, and cultural expression.

1. Recognize literary context
Moderation systems should consider whether content is:

poetry or fiction;
a quotation from a literary or historical work;
literary criticism or academic discussion;
artistic expression;
educational or cultural material;
or an actual violation of the relevant policy.
The presence of sensitive words alone should not determine the treatment of a literary work.

2. Give legitimate literary content an alternative to removal
Where content is mature but not otherwise prohibited, Meta should consider measures such as age restrictions, sensitive-content warnings, or reduced recommendation rather than automatically removing the material or penalizing the account.

Mature does not automatically mean prohibited.

3. Protect accounts from disproportionate penalties
A writer should not risk losing access to an account simply because an automated system misunderstood a literary passage.

Where there is uncertainty, enforcement should favor review and context rather than immediate account-level punishment.

4. Create meaningful human review
Users whose literary, artistic, educational, or cultural content is removed should have access to an appeal process capable of recognizing context, language, genre, and cultural differences.

An appeal should not simply lead to another automated decision.

5. Improve transparency
Meta should clearly explain when literary or artistic content is restricted and provide users with a meaningful explanation of the policy involved.

Creators should be able to understand what happened and, when appropriate, correct a mistaken decision.

This is not a request to abolish moderation
We support reasonable measures against exploitation, harassment, sexual solicitation, and genuinely harmful content.

The question is not whether Meta should have rules.

The question is whether those rules can be applied without treating every occurrence of sensitive language as equivalent.

A social network that hosts literature must be capable of recognizing the difference between a solicitation and a sentence from a novel, between pornography and literary criticism, and between harmful content and a work of art that happens to deal with mature subjects.

Our request
We call on Meta to develop moderation systems that are more context-aware, transparent, and proportionate, and to ensure that legitimate literary, artistic, educational, and cultural expression is not unnecessarily removed or penalized.

Literature should be judged in context, not by isolated words.

If you believe that writers should be able to share literature without having their work automatically mistaken for prohibited content, sign this petition and ask Meta to improve its approach to literary and cultural expression.