On Tuesday, Norwegian news site VG reported that a 16-year-old boy found his newest Facebook profile photo deleted automatically by the site, but not for containing offensive content or misrepresenting himself. Embret Henock Haldammen, a high school student in Kristiansand, Norway, had posted his latest school portrait weeks earlier, only to receive a notice stating that "the profile picture violated Facebook's policies."

Without receiving a response clarifying what those policies were, Haldammen came to the conclusion that the image was deleted because of his face's lymphatic malformations, which he's had since birth.

"We're used to people pointing, looking, and laughing at him," Haldammen's father said to Norwegian news site Fædrelandsvennen (translated by Google). "But that Facebook acts as a youth, and not a company, is appalling." The reports also include a photo of Haldammen posing with a former Norwegian Prime Minister, which he had used as a profile photo in the past with no incident.

A Facebook Scandinavia spokesperson responded to both reports, clarifying that the image's removal came as the result of an outside user reporting it. "Sometimes it goes wrong, and in this case, the removal of the image was incorrect," the spokesperson said, adding that the image did not, as it turns out, violate Facebook policy (unlike a 2008 brouhaha over photos of breastfeeding appearing on the site).

Facebook's American arm clarified to Ars that "this picture was mistakenly removed by one of the members of our team. As our team processes more than one million reports each week, we occasionally make a mistake. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and we have already taken steps that should prevent this from happening in the future."

Haldammen's profile page has since been updated with a new profile photo, and its caption reads, "Hoping to keep this picture! I am what I am, and I look like me, not everyone else."

This story comes on the heels of the American arm of Facebook locking out "several hundred" drag queens, performers, and LGBT personalities from their Facebook accounts over the site's real name policy. Original complainant Sister Roma posted an account of meeting Facebook officials in San Francisco on Wednesday: "While we could not get them to budge on the actual [real name] policy, they did seem more open to considering that there are flaws in the complaint review process," she wrote.

Facebook issued its own statement about that meeting, stating that those hundreds of affected users have had their profiles reinstated for a two-week period to "give them a chance to decide how they’d like to represent themselves on Facebook." However, the site will still require that any personal pages lead off with a legally given name; otherwise, the pages can be converted to a capital-P Page.