Facebook apologises for banning US magazine’s cartoon over showing too much nipple

But that wasn’t the only funny business facing New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,who also had to correct several media outlets that fell for a joke he and the artist made soon after the alleged censorship.

Drawn by Mick Stevens,the cartoon shows the first man and woman sitting shirtless beneath an apple tree.

Eve’s nipples are represented by small,black dots,which ultimately got the magazine banned from Facebook for breaching community standards,Mankoff wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Facebook’s policy prohibits not only “any obvious sexual activity,” but also “naked ‘private parts’ including female nipple bulges and naked butt cracks; male nipples are ok,” Gawker discovered earlier this year.

In order to poke a little fun at the social networking site,the artist redrew the cartoon for Mankoff’s blog post,with Adam and Eve wearing bulky sweaters and long pants.

This,Mankoff joked,was an attempt “to get back into Facebook’s good graces.”

He wrote that “the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor.”

Not getting this joke — and seeming to believe that a prominent magazine and frequent defender of free speech would actually redraft its content to please Facebook — New York media outlets Gawker and the Daily Intel reported that this clothed picture was a serious attempt to placate,Mankoff wrote.

“I feel compelled to state the obvious because the obvious wasn’t obvious to Gawker,” he wrote.

Facebook has aroused freedom of expression concerns many times before,from accusations of biases like homophobia for censoring a gay kiss in 2011 to claims that it fosters intolerance towards religious people.

Responding to what the New Yorker is now calling “Nipplegate,” Facebook told the Daily News the incident was completely unintended.

“Recently,Facebook mistakenly blocked a cartoon as part of our efforts to keep the site safe for all and quickly worked to rectify the mistake as soon as we were notified,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Apologizing for “any inconvenience,” the site’s spokesperson said its policies are enforced by a team of reviewers in several offices across the globe.

“This team looks at hundreds of thousands of reports every week,and as you might expect,occasionally,we make a mistake and block a piece of content we shouldn’t have. We have already taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future,” they said.