Facebook Won’t Tweak Female Nipple Censorship

Two Lemons with grounding shadow on pure white background. Focus on nipples.
Daisy Doctor
By Daisy Doctor



It hasn’t been an easy year for Facebook, with data breaches and a dropping userbase, the platform is now attempting to be as transparent as possible going forward.

One thing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pointed out the way the platform handles female nipple censorship.

During a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said the quick censorship of nipples posted on Facebook is actually thanks to an AI system.

“Ninety-nine per cent of terrorism content we take down before anyone sees it,” Zuckerberg said.

“Whereas hate speech, which is more nuanced linguistically, that’s going to take more years to do something reasonable.”

“It’s easier to build an AI system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

On a separate conference call a week earlier, Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert said the strict censorship was an effort to protect women from exploitation.

“Fundamentally our nudity standards are about safety. It’s very hard for us to determine the age of a person depicted in a nude image.”

“It’s also very hard for us to determine consent. So even if it’s pretty clear the person consented to the image being taken, it’s very hard to tell if the person consented to the image being shared,” she said.

“We have always wanted to be able to carve out situations where we know consent and age are not an issue.”

“We, therefore, have allowed for years breastfeeding photos. We have now made more carve-outs. So we allow, for instance, nude images that are about cancer awareness or post-surgery photos. We allow female nipples in political protest.”

In other words, nipples censorship won’t be tweaked any time soon.




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