Has Facebook sorted out the difference between the nudity of Michelangelo’s full frontal David and the naked nine-year-old Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack?

How risqué in Facebook-world is an eyeful of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, complete with “fully nude female breast”, buttocks and partially covered genitalia or a thousand Renaissance works featuring nude children, aka cherubs?

This is a pressing issue now that Facebook has censored a post by a Norwegian writer Tom Egeland in which he showed the famous war-time photo of Kim Phúc running from a toxic cloud.

For his violation of “community standards” Egeland was suspended from Facebook, a form of punishment equivalent to being belted with rotten tomatoes in the stocks. When the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported on this ham-fisted piece of taste management, using the same photo to illustrate the story, someone or something at Palo Alto, removed the entire article and sent a message to the newspaper, saying:

Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed.

Facebook had to endure a lecture from Aftenposten’s editor, Espen Egil Hansen, who brought a generous dose of Scandinavian censoriousness to his front page:

Even though I am editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper, I have to realise that you are restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility. I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly.

Under Facebook’s community standards policies, David’s fully nude willy is perfectly safe, but be careful of those buttocks, breasts and vaginas.

Curiously, Palo Alto took no action in response to the Guardian’s Facebook post reporting these events, which used the same photo taken by the Associated Press’ Huynh Công Ut on June 8, 1972.

Maybe the algorithms were out to lunch, or because a global fuss was well and truly underway, Mark Zuckerberg’s lieutenants were in a conference trying to decipher their own community standards policies.

We must remember that it is the posts on Facebook that are subject to erratic censorship – Egeland and Aftenposten would encounter no such difficulty publishing the photo on their own sites.

The realisation comes too late that the rush by news publishers to sign up their content to Facebook hands Zuckerberg & Co control not only of tone and content but the ability to snaffle the revenue.

There are all sorts of other rules and regulations tucked in the backend of these social media platforms, which no one reads. Facebook’s “hate speech” policy is a triumph of uncertainty.

Being rude to people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disabilities is not allowed. However, “People can use Facebook to challenge ideas, institutions and practices ... Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others about that hate speech ...”

It’s a balancing act with shifting borders, so little wonder the outcome results in torrents of sewerage that passes for “challenging ideas” – as long as there are no “fully nude” female genitals.

Actually, if Facebook had half a wit it would know that it wasn’t the nudity of “the Napalm girl” that affronted – it was the vision of terror and destruction brought on by that futile western intervention in someone else’s war.

This is as clear an indication as any that automated news delivery is unable to distinguish stupidity from relevance.

It’s going to get worse as more and more news curation gives way to the march of the algorithms. The business news publisher Bloomberg is charging into automated journalism with its ears back. It starts with computers writing what in the trade is known as “commodity news” but as artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent the business of writing features, analysis and commentary will steadily shift to the machines.

Zuckerberg insists he runs a tech company, not a media company. Yet, the two are inseparable. He’s on relatively safe ground when his content consists of dancing bears and cats playing the piano, but anything requiring context and perception may be beyond his mathematics.

One thing is certain: journalists and editors hate being censored, particularly by unworldly geeks who are eating their lunch.