Facebook and Instagram may soon bring back the bazooms after Meta’s Oversight Board found that the ban on women’s nipples was sexist and discriminatory towards trans and nonbinary people.
Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent group of journos, academics and politicians that advise Meta on their rules and policies, advised the company on January 17 that it’s about time it updates its rules around nips.
They found that the rules were very unclear for people who didn’t identify as women. They’re also pretty sexist in that they only really apply to women’s nipples and not men’s. After all, there’s nothing inherently sexual about a nipple, my friends. Set them FREE!
“The [old] policy is based on a binary view of gender and a distinction between male and female bodies,” a spokesperson for the Meta Oversight Board said in a statement.
“We are constantly evolving our policies to help make our platforms safer for everyone.
“We know more can be done to support the LGBTQIA+ community, and that means working with experts and LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisations on a range of issues and product improvements.”
We love to see a multimillion-dollar company taking a pause and thinking “hmm… maybe we shouldn’t discriminate against women and queer people.” Love the progress. Very slay.
The recommendations ask Instagram and Facebook to make guidelines that are “governed by clear criteria that respect international human rights standards,” and I’m honestly shocked they weren’t in the first place???
Meta reportedly has 60 days to actually respond to these recommendations and free the nipple. Whether they listen to them or not will be interesting to see.
If you start seeing tiddies appearing all over your Instagram feed, just assume that the Oversight Board got their message across.
“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,” Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism, told The Guardian.
“That ought to be possible, but I’m sceptical of whether it is if content moderation is automated.
“A post about top surgery should not have been flagged in the first place, but it was. 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 marginalised, or the minority in society.
“Those are the people who are penalised by the application of an algorithm.”
C’mon Zuck, you know what to do now. Free the nipple. Show us all that you have a soul.
