There’s not been much cheer on Australia’s Christmas Island lately… the remote birdwatching mecca has had an ad pulled by Facebook for mentioning boobies.
The tiny Australian territory, 360 miles south of Java, was promoting its twitching credentials with a picture of a baby Brown Booby bird with the text: ‘Some gorgeous shots here of some juvenile boobies’ but the social media site claimed the picture breached guidelines by ‘addressing the age, gender or sexual orientation of users on Facebook’.
The banning of the ad is a blow for the island’s fledgling ecotourism industry. The main source of revenue for islanders currently comes from its detention centre but this is facing imminent closure, meaning the 1,350 residents are turning to tourism to secure their livelihoods.
One of the key facets of the change has been the island’s ‘Bird’n’Nature Week’ this month that draws birders from around the globe to see endemic landbirds and 80,000 nesting seabirds, including the critically endangered Abbott’s Booby (above).
Linda Cash, Marketing Manager of the Christmas Island Tourism Association said “We have a limited marketing budget, so our Facebook campaigns offer us a great opportunity to share the wonderful birdlife on our island. We presumed our original advert was blocked automatically so we appealed to Facebook directly who re-affirmed the campaign was banned due to the sexual language – particularly the use of the word ‘boobies’.”
Sam Collins, founder of London-based Ethos Travel, the first company to offer mainstream holidays to the island in the UK, said: “Christmas Island tourism is in its infancy, but there are few places in the world where you can find such a magical concentration of rare species of sea and land animals. Bird Conservation Week is one of the best times to visit and the economy there is becoming increasingly reliant on holidaymakers from the UK and the rest of Europe. By blocking the tourist board’s campaign, one of the world’s great new eco-tourism destinations is being deprived of its lifeline because someone at Facebook cannot comprehend that a Booby is a bird.”
