“Free the nipple.”
The front for the “liberation of the nipple”, which protests against the censorship of bare breasts in the public space and on social networks, could have won a victory.
And not least: Meta - the parent company of Facebook and Instagram - is about to review its nudity rules.
The group's supervisory board is particularly opposed to the one that prohibits women from showing their bare breasts and that harms the possibility of women and transgender or non-binary people to express themselves.
“We ask Meta to look into this issue.
We say there should be more equality,” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark and member of Meta's supervisory board, said Thursday (January 19) during an online Instagram conference.
“Interestingly, the only non-sexualized nipples are those of men or those that have had surgery,” she added.
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“The removal of these images is not in conformity”
The social media giant's "supreme court" recently ruled that Meta should not have taken down photos posted by a couple showing their breasts, with nipples covered.
The caption of said photo evoked the health of transgender people and explained that one of the two people was soon to be operated on to have her breasts removed, as part of sex reassignment surgery.
The couple were raising funds to help them finance the intervention.
"The removal of these images is not consistent with Meta's values or its human rights responsibilities," the supervisory board said Tuesday.
"The company's adult nudity policy more strongly restricts women, transgender and non-binary people from expressing themselves on its platforms,"
As a reminder: created in 2020 on the proposal of Mark Zuckerberg, the supervisory board is made up of twenty international members (journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and former political leaders).
It is responsible for evaluating the Californian group's content moderation policy.
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Subjective moderation
Meta rules today prohibit images containing female nipples, except in certain health contexts, such as breastfeeding or gender reassignment surgeries.
“This regulation is based on a binary vision of gender,” notes the board.
"This involves moderators quickly and subjectively determining sex and gender, which is unrealistic on a large scale."
To change the situation, he therefore recommends that Meta's management define "clear, objective and respectful of human rights criteria so that people are treated without sex or gender discrimination, in accordance with international human rights standards". .
Instagram is regularly accused of prudishness and lack of objectivity by its users.
"Release these beauties," model Helena Christensen wrote Thursday in commentary to a parody video of comedian Celeste Barber shaking her pixelated bare breasts.
Verdict by mid-March
During Thursday's Instagram Oversight Board conference, users asked why Meta wouldn't just "release" "all the nipples."
However, for the time being, the members of the entity are not commenting on this question.
"This case shows that Meta's current rules restricting nipple images are confusing and based on a binary view of gender, and a distinction between male and female bodies," Julie Owono, a member of the council, told AFP. counsel and director of the NGO Internet sans frontières.
Meta, for its part, recalled that the disputed images had already been reinstated, and that the company had already recognized that they should not have been removed.
"We know we can do more to support the LGBTQ+ community," a spokesperson told AFP.
The group plans to respond to the council's recommendations publicly by mid-March.
In August 2021, Instagram issued an apology after the brief removal of posts sharing the poster for Spaniard Pedro Almodovar's film,
Madres Paralelas
, which shows a nipple from which a drop of milk hangs.
They had been reinstated in the name of the artistic context.
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And in October 2020, the application had revised one of its rules on photos of breasts, which prohibited “compressing” them, under penalty of the cliché being considered pornographic, and therefore removed.
A plus-size model then accused Instagram of discrimination and the platform ended up allowing content in which a person hugs or simply holds her chest.
In video, an ad with topless women shows the difficulties of breastfeeding
