Communications of the ACM
Meta Board Trashes Facebook's 'Convoluted and Poorly Defined' Female Nipple Rule
The board acknowledged, "The lack of clarity inherent in this policy creates uncertainty for users and reviewers, and makes it unworkable in practice."
Credit: Getty/Futurism
The group tasked with overseeing decisions at Facebook and Instagram is suggesting that Meta, those social networks' parent company, take a long, hard look at its infamous rule banning the "female-presenting nipple."
In a statement, Meta's Oversight Board said its suggestion for revision of the nipple rule stems from the removal of two Instagram posts, dated 2021 and 2022, from an account run by a pair of transgender activists.
In both posts, which featured captions advocating for trans healthcare, the couple posed without shirts but had their nipples covered, the statement notes. The posts were flagged by users in spite of not overtly violating community standards and were removed by a content moderation algorithm, with Meta ultimately deciding that their removal was justified — a decision that the board has now overturned.
This reversal, the Oversight Board noted in its statement, was done in part because the notorious nipple rule is "based on a binary view of gender and a distinction between male and female bodies," and as such "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, which is not practical when moderating content at scale."
From Futurism
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