Facebook has announced an update to its policy on images related to breast cancer, after 20,000 people signed a Change.org petition pressuring the social media giant to stop removing photos of mastectomies. Breast cancer advocates argue that Facebook’s policy has previously been too vague — allowing images depicting breast cancer scars to be frequently categorized as “pornography” — and see the company’s updated announcement as an important victory.

“We agree that undergoing a mastectomy is a life-changing experience, and that it’s important to share photos to raise awareness of breast cancer and support the men and women who are facing diagnosis, undergoing treatment, or living with the scars of cancer,” Facebook’s new policy on mastectomy photos states. “The vast majority of these kinds of photos are compliant with our policies. However, photos with fully exposed breasts, particularly if they’re unaffected by surgery, do violate Facebook’s Terms.”

Activists hope that explicit policy will prevent Facebook from continuing to remove photos from the SCAR Project, which shares images of breast cancer scars in order to “raise public consciousness of early-onset breast cancer, and to help young survivors see their scars, faces, figures and experiences through a new, honest and ultimately empowering lens.” Under the company’s previously vague content guidelines, the SCAR Project’s photos were repeatedly removed from its Facebook page — and its founder, photographer David Jay, was banned from the site for 30 days. Advocates pointed out that, since Facebook has a policy differentiating breastfeeding from nudity, it should do the same for breast cancer images.

In its press statement about its mastectomy policy, Facebook explained it has “long allowed mastectomy photos to be shared on Facebook, as well as educational and scientific photos of the human body and photos of women breastfeeding,” although the company acknowledged that “on occasion, we may remove a photo showing mastectomy scarring either by mistake, as our teams review millions of pieces of content daily.”

Facebook’s content guidelines have come under fire over the past several weeks as advocates have criticized the social media site for consistently censoring women’s health images rather than images that endorse or celebrate domestic violence. Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of the Women’s Media Center, recently submitted a Facebook ad refuting the scientifically disputed link between abortion and breast cancer — but Facebook rejected it for violating its ban on “adult products,” the same reason that similar breast cancer-related ads created by Kinsey Bruns have been rejected in the past. Taken together with Facebook’s past resistance to remove content that jokes about raping and beating women, Kinsey Bruns pointed out that the disparate policies illustrate “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

But successful online activism continues to influence Facebook to update its policies — or at least promise to do so. After advocates successfully pressured over a dozen companies to stop advertising with Facebook to protest its domestic violent content, the company announced that it will strengthen its policy to ensure that content promoting violence against women will not be tolerated. “We need to do better — and we will,” a statement from Facebook said.

Seven days after Women Action and the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and activist Soraya Chemaly called on Facebook to remove content that condones hate speech and violence against women, Facebook responded that it will update its policies that add a new emphasis to taking domestic violence seriously.

The company promises to complete a review of its community standards on hate speech, update training for the staff that review harmful content, increase accountability for the creators of the content, and establish new partnerships with women’s rights groups. Additionally, Facebook will encourage international anti-defamation groups it works with to include women’s groups in their conversations.

Here is an excerpt of Facebook’s statement:

In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want. In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.

By Tuesday afternoon, 15 companies announced they had pulled their advertising and at least a dozen more were reviewing their advertising on the platform. While Facebook has already made commitments to actively review hate speech, domestic violence did not fall under the same criteria until today.

Last week, activists launched a campaign that urged companies to boycott Facebook advertising because the social media network allows users to post images of domestic violence against women, while banning advertisements about women’s health. More than a dozen companies have pulled their advertising as a result, including online bank Nationwide UK, Nissan UK, and J Street.

Many larger companies have been slower to respond, including two companies that market brands specifically to women. Dove, a Unilever brand that is running a “self-esteem” ad campaign for women, is facing pressure on Twitter, while Procter & Gamble’s response was, “We can’t control what content they [our advertising] pops up next to. Obviously it’s a shame that our ad happened to pop up next to it.”

Zappos replied that users who are upset by an ad appearing next to a date rape image “click the X to delete the ad.” Though Zipcar has not stopped advertising it “expressed to Facebook the critical need to block this content from appearing.” And Audible has responded that it will not take down advertising. “Audible does not condone or endorse violence against women,” but it “takes pride in and respects the rules that govern our Facebook community and because of this we do not delete negative posts. However, we must delete, and will continue to delete, any content that contains offensive, graphic images.”

Facebook’s rules, however, appear to be enforced unevenly. A Facebook spokesperson told ThinkProgress that content featuring battered women, rape, and violence falls under “poor taste” or “crude attempts at humor” and does not violate its policies. And while Facebook screens anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic, and homophobic hate speech, the same standards do not apply to images of violence against women. At the same time, Facebook rejected an ad about breast cancer because it showed a woman’s breast.

Facebook rejected an ad this week that disputed scientifically unsound claims that abortion can cause higher instances of breast cancer, arguing that the advertisement violated the company’s guidelines “by advertising adult products or services, including toys, videos, or sexual enhancement products.” The news comes as a coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are pressuring Facebook to take a stronger stance in favor of women’s health and crackdown against messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women.

“I’m a big supporter of that campaign,” Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of Women’s Media Center and the creator of the ad, told ThinkProgress in a telephone interview on Saturday morning. The ad linked to a page on the National Cancer Institute website reassuring women that “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”

The rejected ad via Kinsey Bruns’ Twitter handle @ClinicEscort:

Kinsey Bruns said she expected Facebook to disapprove of the ad, but submitted it anyway to highlight what she described as “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

Indeed, the company has come under criticism for removing images of “mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies” and labeling them as “pornographic,” while allowing photographs and forums that make light of abusing and raping women. That content often falls under the “humor” section of Facebook’s content guidelines. Activists are encouraging companies that advertise with Facebook to boycott the company until they can be assured their ads will not appear next to content that promotes sexual violence and abuse.

Kinsey Bruns submitted a similar breast cancer ad last year, with an illustration of a woman touching her breast, but it too was rejected. She says she plans to experiment more with the company’s guidelines, posting ads with celebrities like Nicki Minaj in outrageous clothing or showing “sideboob” to test the boundaries and inconsistencies of the media giant’s standards.

Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines state, “Ads may not promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including but not limited to toys, videos, publications, live shows, or sexual enhancement products. Ads for family planning and contraception are allowed provided they follow the appropriate targeting requirements.”

Go ahead — check those notifications. According to a new pilot study conducted by Dr. Alice Good of the University of Portsmouth, the vast majority of Facebook users use the social network to lift their spirits when they’re feeling down by navigating their old photos and wall posts in which they’ve interacted with family and friends — a “self-soothing” coping mechanism somewhat akin to flipping through a photo album or watching old home videos.

Researchers argue that that could be a big boost for users who are prone to anxiety or depression by providing a healthy emotional conduit for reminiscing about the good times in one’s life. The findings also shed new light into what, exactly, users are looking to achieve when they use social media to share their feelings and experiences:

Psychologist Dr Clare Wilson, also of the University of Portsmouth, said: “Although this is a pilot study, these findings are fascinating.

“Facebook is marketed as a means of communicating with others. Yet this research shows we are more likely to use it to connect with our past selves, perhaps when our present selves need reassuring.

“The pictures we often post are reminders of a positive past event. When in the grip of a negative mood, it is too easy to forget how good we often feel. Our positive posts can remind us of this.”

Dr Good’s study has concluded that looking at comforting photos, known as reminiscent therapy, could be an effective method of treating mental health. [...]

The act of self-soothing is an essential tool in helping people to calm down, especially if they have an existing mental health condition.

The findings are particularly interesting given past studies that have indicated that Facebook users end up feeling depressed after a browsing session. For instance, one German study found that “one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most.”

But those findings derived from users’ envy at their friends’ vacations, life milestones, and various successes. The new preliminary data from Dr. Good’s study suggests that, used in a different way — i.e., actively “self-soothing” rather than passively sulking — browsing through one’s Facebook history could be a net benefit. And that could be very good news from a global mental health perspective for the social network, which has over a billion users worldwide and counting.