Meta restricts ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain due to content guidelines

A theatre in Barcelona has been prohibited from advertising a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on Instagram and Facebook due to the inclusion of 'social topics.' The Teatre Raval, which has a seating capacity of 193, inquired with Meta, the parent company of the two social media platforms, about the ban and was informed that mentions of civil rights, feminism, or social reform are classified as 'social topics' by the platform's automatic system and are filtered out. To address the issue, Meta suggested that the theatre remove 'key words' to avoid appearing to promote activism. The theatre issued a statement expressing concern over the restriction, stating, 'We feel obliged to speak up about the injustice and violation of our rights by not being allowed to promote a feminist work, specifically a work by Virginia Woolf who was born in 1882.' The production features a one-woman show starring Clara Sanchis, based on a series of talks Woolf delivered in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the only two colleges at Cambridge University that admitted women at the time. These talks were later published as an essay discussing women's societal roles and their access to education. Woolf noted that to create quality fiction, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own.' Sanchis commented to La Vanguardia, 'We don’t know if the publicity has been rejected because of the name of Virginia Woolf or because of the word feminism, or both. In any case, it’s a way of erasing from the map advances that have taken centuries to achieve. We have given social media unlimited power and every day we can see how dangerous this is. It’s bias and manipulation.'