Meta blocked an ad for a play based on Virginia Woolf's essay

The basis is an internal Meta ban. Back in October of last year, the company banned all advertising on political, electoral and social topics in the European Union. As a solution, Meta recommended that the theater edit the ad text and remove the "keywords." The theater regarded the company's response as an act of censorship.

The situation looks absurd if only because it concerns a literary classic. The essay "A Room of One's Own" was published in 1929 and is considered one of the key texts of feminist literary criticism. It is based on a series of lectures the British writer delivered at two Cambridge colleges. These were the university's only colleges admitting women at the time.

The essay's main thesis: intellectual freedom depends directly on material independence. In Woolf's view, a woman needs money and personal space to realize her creative potential — that very "room of her own."

The Teatre Raval case shows how automatically applied moderation rules affect cultural institutions. For advertisers in the creative industries, this is a signal: announcements containing the words "feminism," "civil rights" or "social reforms" will not pass Meta's filters in the EU, regardless of context.