"Facebook warns widow, 81, her knitted-pig posts are hate speech"

A 81-year-old widow was threatened by Facebook with a permanent ban from the site after her posts about knitted ‘white pigs’ fell foul of hate speech rules.

Mrs Rita Rich-Mulcahy, a self-avowed “porcophile”, had set up a Facebook page devoted to her knitted woollen pigs after the death of her husband last year.

However, the retired teacher from Shropshire drew the ire of Facebook after commenting “white pigs” on a picture about rabbits and captioning a photo of one of her creations with “high-viz pigs”.

Facebook deleted her two posts and threatened to permanently bar her from the site for “hate speech”.

Mrs Rich-Mulcahy said: “Facebook obviously uses a bot to trawl around Facebook and I had made two comments, totally innocent, which the bot saw as hate speech.

“Everyone on the knitting site and my page knows I am a porcophile.

“It may seem a small thing to most people, but to someone who had never even had an overdue library book, being charged with using hate speech was frightening,” she added.