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Mom berates Instagram for removing a photo of her child’s deformed face

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PHOTO: Ours altered life/http://www.ouralteredlife.com/
PHOTO: Ours altered life/http://www.ouralteredlife.com/

A furious mother has caught everyone’s attention after she blasted Instagram for removing a photo of her 12-year-old son, who has a facial deformity.

According to reports, the photo-sharing site removed the picture after another user reported the image.

Harry Beswick (12) was born with Goldenhar syndrome: he was born without his left eye, left eye socket, left nostril and left ear.

His mother, Charlie Beswick (38) from Stoke-on-Trent, told Daily Mail she regularly posts pictures of her 12-year-old on Instagram but was shocked to see that they’d removed one of them without prior warning.

“It really upset me to have my child's face taken off the platform [as if] it contravened some sort of guideline.”

“I felt quite offended, quite confused,” she told Daily Mail

Charlie, who’s built up quite a following on her Instagram page, also claimed that it’s not the first time her son’s pictures – where he’s pictured without his prosthetic eye – have been removed.

“I can only assume someone reported it because they don't agree with Harry's appearance, they don't want to see that – which is fine, everyone's entitled to their opinion. But they can just ignore the picture, scroll past,” she said.

“But they've chosen to report it and Instagram agreed with them. So my issue is that Instagram is condoning [this person’s] attitude towards Harry’s appearance,” she told The Mirror UK.


According to The Mirror UK, Harry, his mom and his twin brother Oliver appeared on Good Morning Britain to talk about Instagram's decision.

Charlie said that even though the page attracts its fair share of trolls who have, according to The Sun, heartlessly described Harry as an ‘abomination’ and ‘monster’, the positive comments outweigh the negative.

“We do get trolls and I'm quite thick skinned, I do a lot of policing on Instagram. You get people telling me I should kill him with fire, he's an abomination, a monster, freak, alien.”

“But for every one of [the negative comments] there’s two to three hundred incredibly supportive comments. It's few and far between,” she told Daily Mail.

Harry goes to a special school because of his autism and suffers from global learning delay, which means his cognitive and physical development is much slower than that of others.

“It's a public forum and they should be supporting people who deserve their support and encouragement. I’m trying to become an advocate for children like Harry and families like us, and I hoped Instagram would support us in a positive way, not make life difficult – because we have enough [to deal with] already,” she told The Sun

Instagram's community guidelines prohibit photos deemed 'inappropriate for a diverse audience' including those depicting nudity, celebrating organised crime or terrorism, or glorifying self-injury.

Sources: mirror.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, thesun.co.uk

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