Facebook, long criticized for a, shall we say, unevenly applied nudity policy — Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs are a no-go, but revenge porn is kosher — is apparently trying to come up with a more nimble approach for addressing nudity in its community guidelines.
In a blog post on Friday, Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, and Justin Osofsky, vice president of global operations and media partnerships, announced that “continued feedback from our community and partners” about “the kinds of images and stories permitted on Facebook” prompted some self-reflection and adjustment:
Observing global standards for our community is complex. Whether an image is newsworthy or historically significant is highly subjective. Images of nudity or violence that are acceptable in one part of the world may be offensive — or even illegal — in another. Respecting local norms and upholding global practices often come into conflict. And people often disagree about what standards should be in place to ensure a community that is both safe and open to expression.
The post went on to explain that, in the coming weeks, Facebook will start to accept “more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest — even if they might otherwise violate our standards.” The goal is “to allow more images and stories without posing safety risks or showing graphic images to minors and others who do not want to see them.”
It sounds like Facebook is implementing its own version of the third prong ofthe Miller test, the Supreme Court’s way of determining whether or not any content is obscene; Facebook is essentially saying that if a work passes the SLAPS test — if it has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value — its worth outweighs its potential ability to scandalize or offend.
The announcement comes in the wake of Facebook’s widely lambasted call toremove the iconic Vietnam War “Napalm Girl” photograph from the site. The reasoning: The Vietnamese girl in the famous image is naked. Backlash predictably ensued (including a letter from none other than the prime minister of Norway, who criticized the photo’s removal and reposted it on her own page) and Facebook changed course. At the time, the site released a statement explaining that while “an image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our community standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”
Shortly after that, Facebook found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from a now 14-year-old girl, whose naked photograph was displayed on a “shame page” as “an act of revenge,” without her consent, from November 2014 to January 2016. Her lawsuit alleges that Facebook could have used a tracking process to ID the image and prevent its re-publication, but that Facebook declined to do so. (Facebook tried and failed to get the case thrown out.)
The dicey part of this progress is that the power to determine what is and is not newsworthy on Facebook — just like the power to determine what is and is not pornography — still lies with Facebook alone. (Though they say they’ll be consulting with “partners” and “the community” to make these decisions, who knows what that will mean in practice?) The track record is not the best.
Take the back-and-forth around breastfeeding images, which Facebook banned until enough users complained, at which point the community guidelines were altered to clarify that “we restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring.” These rules, like all rules, betray a value system, and it’s one that is a little unnerving: So, mothers’ breasts are beautiful but everyone else’s are porn?
That was in 2015. Just last week, Facebook removed an article about mammograms from a major newspaper in France because the story’s lead image showed a woman — obviously — getting a mammogram, and one of her nipples was exposed. (In 2015, the site removed a different mammogram photo and banned the administrators of the page that shared it.) The site seems to operate under the misguided, even dangerous belief that women’s bodies are inherently sexual; that there is no context, save for the obviously maternal or ill, in which a woman’s nipples do not exist to titillate. Men’s bare torsos do not violate the site’s terms.
