Facebook and Instagram will begin allowing transgender and non-binary individuals to show their bare breasts online.
On Wednesday, Meta’s Oversight Board announced a policy that grants transgender and other non-binary people permission to post images showing their nipples to the apps. However, the policy forbids cis-gender women from doing the same.
“The Oversight Board finds that removing these posts is not in line with Meta’s Community Standards, values or human rights responsibilities,” the board wrote. “These cases also highlight fundamental issues with Meta’s policies.”
They added, “Meta’s internal guidance to moderators on when to remove content under the Sexual Solicitation policy is far broader than the stated rationale for the policy, or the publicly available guidance. This creates confusion for users and moderators and, as Meta has recognized, leads to content being wrongly removed.”
In addition, the board also mentioned the current policy of Meta “is based on a binary view of gender and a distinction between male and female bodies.”
“Such an approach makes it unclear how the rules apply to intersex, non-binary and transgender people,” the board said. “And requires reviewers to make rapid and subjective assessments of sex and gender. Which is not practical when moderating content at scale.”
As great as the policy might sound to some, many social media users called out the board for the change.
One Twitter user said, “Wtaf? ‘Meta’s Oversight Board ruled that the old policy of barring women’s breasts was discriminatory to gender-fluid people.’ So they’re just going to discriminate against women instead. I really couldn’t be arsed about Free The Nipple apart from breastfeeding.”
