Facebook and Instagram’s parent company could soon free the nipple. More than a decade after breastfeeding mothers first held a “nurse-in” at Facebook’s headquarters to protest against its ban on breasts, Meta’s oversight board has called for an overhaul to the company’s rules banning bare-chested images of women – but not men.
In a decision dated 17 January, the oversight board – a group of academics, politicians, and journalists who advise the company on its content-moderation policies – recommended that Meta change its adult nudity and sexual activity community standard “so that it is governed by clear criteria that respect international human rights standards”.
The oversight board’s ruling follows Facebook’s censorship of two posts from an account run by an American couple who are transgender and non-binary. The posts showed the couple posing topless, but with their nipples covered, with captions describing trans healthcare and raising money for top surgery.
The posts were flagged by users, then reviewed and removed by an AI system. After the couple appealed the decision, Meta eventually restored the posts.
The board found that “the policy is based on a binary view of gender and a distinction between male and female bodies”, which makes rules against nipple-baring “unclear” when it comes to intersex, non-binary and transgender users. It recommended that Meta “define clear, objective, rights-respecting criteria” when it comes to moderating nudity “so that all people are treated in a manner consistent with international human rights standards”.
“Lactivists” spent the 2000s attempting to squash the image of breasts as inherently sexual, and the campaign to #FreetheNipple went mainstream in 2013. The phrase entered pop-feminist parlance in 2013 after Facebook took down clips from the actor/director Lina Esco’s documentary Free the Nipple.
The campaign gained wide support on college campuses and was championed by celebrities including Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham. As recently as last week, Florence Pugh addressed wearing a sheer, hot pink Valentino gown on the red carpet, saying: “Of course, I don’t want to offend people, but I think my point is: how can my nipples offend you that much?”
In 2015, the Los Angeles-based artist Micol Hebron created stickers of male nipples – which are permitted on Instagram – so that female Instagram users could superimpose them over their own to mock the disparity.
Hebron was invited to Instagram’s headquarters in 2019 with a group of influencers to talk about the company’s nipple policy. “During that meeting, we learned that there were no transgender people on the content moderation policy team, and I also observed that there were no gender-neutral bathrooms there,” Hebron said. “To me, that was all I needed to know to understand the conversation of gender and inclusivity was not being had at Meta.” A Meta representative disputed Hebron’s characterization of the event, adding: “Much has changed since 2019.”
But Hebron said she was “excited” that the oversight board had taken up the issue of gender and sex-based discrimination. “Beyond just ‘let’s let women be topless’, which is not at all my interest, I think it’s really important to hold on to the goal of allowing all bodies to have autonomy,” Hebron said. “It sounds so frivolous to a lot of people to talk about nipples, but if you think about the ways that governments around the world try to control and repress female-identifying bodies, trans bodies or non-binary bodies, it’s not.”
Meta “welcomes the board’s decision in this case”, a representative said in a statement that noted that the couple’s photos had been reinstated “prior to the decision”.
“We are constantly evolving our policies to help make our platforms safer for everyone,” the spokesperson added. “We know more can be done to support the LGBTQ+ community, and that means working with experts and LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations on a range of issues and product improvements.”
Meta has 60 days to respond publicly to the board’s recommendations.
While advocates may welcome the idea of a freer nipple online, questions remain about how Meta’s automated content-moderation systems will be able to enforce a new policy on nipples. A couple fundraising to afford top surgery is not the same as someone soliciting sex online, but the company’s AI did not recognize the difference in the post at first. So how will these systems be able to tell the difference between a topless post and porn?
“Context is everything, and algorithms are terrible at context,” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told the Guardian. “The interesting question will be the tension over how Meta can create new rules without opening the floodgates to porn, which is why those rules exist in the first place. That ought to be possible, but I’m skeptical of whether it is if content moderation is automated.” (Bell previously held several positions at the Guardian, including non-executive director of the Scott Trust.)
Facebook and Instagram users can also flag posts they believe violate the company’s policies, as they did for the photo that spurred the board’s decision. “It doesn’t take a genius to work out that there are certain areas of the culture wars where content moderation gets weaponized,” Bell said. “A post about top surgery should not have been flagged in the first place, but it was. This could have been the actions of an anti-trans bad actor.”
Jillian York, an activist and director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, added that it was “tricky” for companies that use AI to make the right decision in every scenario. “For instance, it’s not easy for an automated technology to make a decision about who is a topless adult, versus who is a topless child,” she said. “AI may be able to make a determination between a nine-year-old and a 26-year-old, but what about a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old?”
Sarah Murnen, the Samuel B Cummings II professor of psychology at Kenyon College, said the Free the Nipple movement had once centered white, cisgender women – but that was changing. “When we talked about this as an issue about cis women, it seemed less important, potentially, than it is now with trans people wanting to be open about their bodies, while anti-trans sentiment is at an all-time-high,” she said.
Now, Meta has been advised to loosen the restrictive, binary way it polices bodies online. But many are quick to doubt AI’s potential to protect all users. “That’s the big lesson of all of this: when you create automated systems, you’re going to have consequences for people who are more marginalized, or the minority in society,” said Bell. “Those are the people who are penalized by the application of an algorithm.”
