{
  "id": 8946904,
  "title": "Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/21/meta-bans-ads-for-virginia-woolf-play-in-spain",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-21T14:30:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News",
    "slug": "hacker-news",
    "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/21/meta-ban-virginia-woolf-a-room-of-ones-own-barcelona-teatre-raval"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A theatre in Barcelona has been barred from promoting a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own on Instagram and Facebook. The reason for the ban is that the work is deemed to include \"social topics\" such as civil rights, feminism or social reform. These topics are automatically classified as \"social topics\" by Meta's system and are filtered out. The Teatre Raval, which has a seating capacity of 193, reached out to Meta to inquire about why its advertising had been blocked. In response, Meta recommended removing \"key words\" to avoid the impression that the advertisement encourages activism. The theatre expressed its disappointment, stating that it feels compelled to address injustice and the violation of its rights by being unable to promote a feminist work, particularly by a woman born in 1882. The production, a one-woman show starring Clara Sanchis, is an adaptation of talks Woolf delivered in 1928 at Newnham and Girton Colleges, which were the only two institutions at Cambridge University that admitted women at the time. The talks were later published as an essay. Woolf famously stated that a woman needs both money and a personal space to create high-quality fiction.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}