If Facebook is going to allow beheading videos, can I start posting pictures of my bottom? The company got a ticking off from David Cameron on Tuesday after deciding not to ban a video which shows a Mexican woman being decapitated. Instead, they’ve slapped a feeble warning message at the front of the video. Meanwhile, in the civilised world, my colleague lost access to the site for a day after he posted a photo of a bare bum. Another friend was banned for a week after posting a photo of a girl in the bath. According to guidelines leaked last year by one of Facebook’s $10-an-hour moderators, there are a lot of things you can’t post on the site: “camel toes and moose knuckles”, maps of Kurdistan, cartoon snot, and the sentence “I love hearing skulls crack”. You can read the full list here. Decapitation photos were on that list, too, so presumably Zuckerberg has got comfortable with extreme gore, and changed company policy. Unfortunately, that newfound tolerance doesn’t extend to the kind of mild nudity you see on a French beach or on the third page of a national newspaper – Facebook’s stern terms of use still prohibit images of "fully exposed breasts”. We know all about America’s strange, uneven puritanism. The way they accused Miley Cyrus of “degrading an icon” because she poked someone in the crotch with a giant foam finger. The fact that swear words are censored in Breaking Bad, a series about a violent crystal meth dealer. But this is another kind of double standards entirely. Why do they want to show decapitation videos, anyway? The official explanation, according to a spokesman is: “Facebook has long been a place where people turn to share their experiences, particularly when they're connected to controversial events on the ground, such as human rights abuses, acts of terrorism and other violent events.” It’s an utterly bizarre change of heart. This is either a minor blunder turned omnishambles or a genuine strategic decision. Assuming it’s the latter, Facebook must be calculating that they want to undercut traditional media and competitors like YouTube, by becoming the place where you can see everything, regardless of taste. It is the same “publisher versus medium” dilemma Amazon faced last week when it emerged they were selling incest porn e-books – do you take responsibility for what is posted on your site, or do you simply shrug and blame it on the users? Amazon chose the first option, purging the site of filth. By choosing to broadcast women having their heads cut off, Facebook has plumped for the second option. Fine, but cashing in on gore while banning mild nudity seems an unnecessary risk to take. Only six months ago the company was forced to delete pages celebrating rape after advertisers disappeared in protest. Facebook might not care what David Cameron thinks, but they can’t be so careless when it comes to advertisers and users. Read more by Jack Rivlin on Telegraph Blogs Follow Telegraph Blogs on Twitter