FB, Insta allow naked breast pics for trans, non-binary people, ban remains for cis-women

California: Meta Oversight Board has allowed transgender and non-binary people to display their naked breasts on Facebook and Instagram. However, the new policy of the company continues to forbid similar posts by cis-gender women.

Meta has been asked to ‘free the nipples’ at its Oversight Board’s recommendation, stating that the ban on bare breasts violates ‘human rights’ of women, transgender and non-binary people.

This decision comes as a boon for artists who can now freely share their artwork on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta’s Oversight Board, composed of academics, politicians and journalists, made the recommendation based on Instagram’s ban of two posts by a couple – a transgender and a non-binary – who posed topless but covered their nipples to enhance awareness around top surgery.

“The Oversight Board finds that removing these posts is not in line with Meta’s Community Standards, values or human rights responsibilities. These cases also highlight fundamental issues with Meta’s policies.”

“Such an approach makes it unclear how the rules apply to intersex, non-binary and transgender people and requires reviewers to make rapid and subjective assessments of sex and gender,” the board said.

The board’s move has been welcomed by the company that had already restored the images, agreeing they should not have been taken down.

Unhappy women

But there has been no respite for women, who have long fought to desexualize images of bare breasts, arguing that men are allowed to share their bare chests.

In 2016, women took to streets in the ‘free the nipple’ movement to desexualise images of bare breasts on social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram. It came after pictures of women breastfeeding were flagged as nudity.

According to the current policy of Meta, photos that show female nipples are been prohibited and censored on the social media platforms.

The Meta Oversight Board lamented that the social media giant’s current policy “is based on a binary view of gender and a distinction between male and female bodies.”

Why Meta banned bare breasts posts on Instagram and Facebook?

Almost a decade ago, Facebook banned its users from sharing bare breasts photographs on their account.

There has been intense debate over Meta’s strict nudity policy and its guidelines in cutting the exposure of women’s nipples.

In 2020, naked protestors – both men and women – marched to Facebook’s headquarters in New York, demanding the policy on bare breasts be changed. They were seen holding up pictures of enlarged nipples.

The movement gained momentum in 2013 after Facebook removed clips from the actor/director Lina Esco’s documentary Free the Nipple. This had sparked protests outside Facebook headquarters in New York.

Several women argue that while hate speech goes uncensored, their nipples are censored, terming them “dangerous”.

In 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerburg tried to justify, saying: “It’s easier to build an AI system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

For the unversed, celebrities including Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham were also earlier forced to remove topless pictures from Instagram, despite them going braless several times in support of the movement.

Reportedly, Meta has been given 60 days to review the board’s advice and make a public response.

What is non-binary?

Non-binary is a term people use to describe genders that don’t fall into one of these two categories – male or female.

People whose gender is not male or female use many terms to describe themselves of which non-binary is most common. They are also called genderqueer, agender, bigender, genderfluid, and more.

Who are transgender?

Transgender is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.

What does cisgender mean?

People who are assigned as female at birth identify as girls/women, and those who are assigned as male at birth identify as boys/men, they are cisgender (or cis).

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