Facebook temporarily suspends account of Liao Yiwu, a prominent Chinese writer who lives in Germany and threatens to permenantly block it if he continued violating Facebook's rules against nudity.

Facebook, an online social networking service, headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates launched its website on February 4, 2004. As of June 2014, Facebook had over 1.3 billion active users. Owing to the huge volume of data collected about users, Facebook's privacy policies have faced scrutiny, among other criticisms.

China, a country that has a state government controlled media that continues to censor content that according to it is unsuitable for the masses. Among the numerous prominent websites, Facebook is too not accessible on Chinese mainland owing to riots that happened 5 years back. Despite the obstacle Facebook faces in China, it is still interested in the vast, however, tightly controlled market. In a surprising move, Facebook suspended the account of a Chinese author and dissident Liao Yiwu citing its policy against nudity. Liao Yiwu, who has been imprisoned for his criticism of China's Communist regime, lives in Berlin. He said that on Wednesday he received notifications from Facebook that the company had temporarily blocked his ability to post updates to his page, although, previous content on his page remained viewable.

According to Yiwu, two photos he posted of an artist friend's nude protest in Stockholm, Sweden, were deleted by Facebook. Meng Huang, his artist friend was protesting the release of jailed Chinese Noble laureate Liu Xiaobo.

The author referred to the photo as 'Performance art' and also went as far as saying that Facebook should be able to distinguish between vulgarity and art. In an interesting statement, Yiwu said, "It feels like I've returned to China and have to play cat and mouse games with Internet censors again."

This comes on the heels of Facebook deleting a self-immolation video made by a prominent Tibetan activist, Ms. Tsering Woeser. Self-immolation acts include setting oneself on fire, jumping off cliffs beside other things as expression of protest and martyrdom. Ms. Woeser said, "I couldn't believe my eyes, I wondered why Facebook suddenly felt like it had become like a Chinese social networking site."

A spokesperson for Facebook brought the company's policies to notice - nudity is prohibited. She said, they work extremely hard to maintain a balance between expression and safety. She further added, "Any suggestion that we took action because of politics, philosophy or theoretical business interests is complete nonsense."

This might increase the already mounting scrutiny of how Facebook treats China related content. However, Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to woo Chinese audience by speaking Mandarin should probably mellow the critics.