Somewhere in the region of 1.45 Billion users post on Facebook each day and, even with their recent doubling of staff monitoring and removing offensive content the company has less than 10,000 content reviewers monitoring what we see to ensure it doesn’t offend us.

Last summer a programme on Channel 4 gave examples of what is and isn’t allowed and was as surprising as it was scary.

For example, a highly graphic and disturbing video of a grown man beating and kicking a three-year-old toddler repeatedly and severely wasn’t removed but simply ‘marked as disturbing’, meaning a warning about the content is posted, but anyone over 16 can view it.

Likewise, footage of graphic self-harm and self-mutilation presented in a way that normalises the practice and almost challenges fellow self-harmers to go further was not taken down but given the ‘Mark as Disturbing’ tag too. And finally, some footage of one teenage girl beating seven bells of snot out of another teenage girl, including repeatedly kicking and kneeing her in the face was also marked with the same M.A.D tag, but not removed. And that’s before you even get close to the terrorist mutilations, far-right crazies and seedy groups promoting who-knows-what kinds of bad behaviour.

The programme described how the outsourced Facebook censors typically have a backlog exceeding 30,000 items to review. Content posted by pages with a significant following such as some of furthest of the far-right groups get dealt with (or not) directly by Facebook. More often it was ‘not’ according to the programme’s findings.

So, after seeing blurred-out versions of all this horrifying content, what is the one criteria that absolutely, instantly qualifies for an instant takedown? Ready? What can be so potentially horrific and offensive that it trumps the most severe physical child abuse, graphic violence and footage of suicidal people mutilating themselves?

A female nipple.

That’s right. Not just any nipple. Not my nipple…my nipple can be all over Facebook with impunity. That bloke beating seven bells out of the child can have ten nipples on display. But any glimpse of a female nipple… how dare you?

Now I get that Facebook has to be hard on anything that could be construed as pornography because the minute there’s a sniff of what Father Ted would have called ‘That kind of thing’ the advertisers would desert and never come back. And, let’s not forget that, away from the big cities, backwoods America is mostly more backward than much of the rest of the world.

And I’m pretty sure that these days any teenage boy desperate for his first glimpse of, er, pretty much anything, can find it in a second without going anywhere near Facebook.

Something here is not right. Any kind of world where the small, wrinkled tip of a gland possessed by 100 per cent of human beings is deemed to be more offensive than extreme violence and cruelty towards children seems like a very strange world indeed.

If I had a teenage son right now and was worried about the potential effect on his personality of showing him footage of a life-giving gland or a grown man beating a tiny child senseless, I’d go for the gland every time. The worst that might happen is he gets an erection and a fit of the giggles.

And this puritanical approach to Facebook’s content management doesn’t seem to apply to the thousands of photos of bikini-clad nubiles wearing that ‘are we finished, please can I go now?’ expression that pop up on some of the motorcycle pages I look at. Nor does it stop Facebook advertising 83 horny Ukranian women desperate to sleep with me right now on my newsfeed, despite me being a happily married, utterly monogamous middle-aged man who uses the internet to look at motorcycles, drum kits and 1970s prog rock stuff. I’m not sure who wrote their advertising algorithm but can I suggest that someone shows him a nipple so he can get it out of his system.

And what is it with this nipple fascination anyway? It’s just a duct, an opening for baby to get food. The physiological equivalent of the door on your fridge. Beyond the curiosity of a teenage boy, surely it’s crazy that so much of the western world seems obsessed with this one gland. What about the other glands, does anyone go so crazy trying to get a glimpse of a lymph node? Am I missing something here? Is there a world of secret fridge-door porn I’m not aware of and would it be inappropriate here to use the word ‘Smeg’?

And what about the male equivalents? Should I be worried about exposing the sweat glands on my balding bonce to the world? ‘Don’t look Martha, you could have your eye out with one of them…etc’

And while we’re at it, do teenage girls have a secret fascination with mens’ wrinkly, sagging love lobes? Should M&S have a lingerie section for the hairy little-fellas, neatly shaved and trussed up in a push-up G-string?

Er… Hello Girls?

It’s ridiculous, of course. The idea that anyone, let alone the whole of womankind, the world’s marketing industry and Facebook’s censors would be remotely interested in my boy-blobs in a push-up ball-bra. Crazy. But no more crazy in reality than our fascination with the female nipple.

Facebook can lead this – the prioritisation, not the ball-bra. As probably the most powerful company in the world right now they have the opportunity to say ‘enough’ to publishing content that promotes or normalises violence. ‘Enough’ to content that promotes hate or plays on the ignorant and ‘enough’ to allowing content that will incite and justify illicit and immoral behaviour. And, if that means a few gratuitous glands slip past the censor and a few advertisers start asking questions then, maybe the warm glow of knowing they are leading, not hiding behind slippery, grubby excuses will make good the losses.