Facebook is making a distinct choice: rather than enable freedom of expression as the company often claims to do, it imposes cultural conservatism, eroding our freedom in the very spaces we perceive to be and treat as our commons

When it comes to nudity, Facebook is little different than Victorian England

When Frédéric Durand-Baïssas shared Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World on Facebook, he probably didn’t expect that the painting – a close-up view of a nude woman’s genitals and abdomen – would trigger the platform’s censors. The French art enthusiast’s profile was removed by Facebook in 2011, reportedly after another user flagged his post for breaching the company’s guidelines on nudity.

Durand-Baïssas, who is suing Facebook for €20,000 ($22,000) in damages, is unfortunately in good company. Over the years, countless others have found their content removed or their entire profiles deleted from social networking sites for posting nude or semi-nude images.

In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that an article the group had posted to Facebook about the presence of a nude statue being challenged in a Kansas City court had been removed. The organization was also banned from posting for 24 hours.

And just last month, Jay-Marie Hill found that photos she had posted – of San Francisco demonstrations against police killings of unarmed black women that shut down rush hour traffic in the city, no doubt a newsworthy event – had been removed from Facebook because some of the female protesters were topless. Hill sees Facebook’s policies as racist, and “exceptionally forgiving to white bodies over other bodies and life experiences”.

“What has been especially problematic is the policing of our (Black) womyn’s online presence as we take a strong position for a cause that explicitly challenges objectification,” says Hill. “Ultimately, these images were not taken down because we were ‘nude’ but because we challenged a system and made people uncomfortable.”

Although she says she was “aware that censorship was a possibility”, Hill nevertheless finds the lack of consistent enforcement on the platform “enraging”, and says she will continue to fight back.

Indeed, while any photo flagged by another user will be reviewed by Facebook, some groups – such as the feminist organization Femen – have pages filled with photos of white women’s breasts, their nipples covered or blurred.

Hill’s point – that Facebook treats certain bodies differently – is further illustrated by how the company regulates nudity by gender.

Mastectomy photos are typically OK, as are personal images of mothers breastfeeding. Men’s nipples are acceptable, but women’s are not. And despite Facebook’s seeming progressiveness toward gender (the platform allows users to self-define their gender), its treatment of transgender bodies is troubling: in one case, a user’s semi-nude photo was taken down and reinstated when they decided the user was a man – despite the user’s physical presentation and personal gender identity.

Facebook is not the only target of activists’ ire. A quick survey at social media companies’ policies shows that most, if not all, ban nudity from their platforms. While some have argued that this is a result of parochial American attitudes toward sex and the human body, companies argue that their policies are about making their platforms a safe space for young people and, in the case of Facebook, a “global and culturally diverse community”.

Although it’s true that Facebook’s user base is diverse, Facebook is not a “community”. It’s a corporation, and its users are its products – but have no say in how the space is regulated.

Here, Facebook is making a distinct choice: rather than enable freedom of expression as the company often claims to do, it is imposing cultural conservatism by claiming that nudity is somehow dangerous. In this, it is little different than Victorian England.

Surprisingly, historical parallels are fundamentally asymmetrical to the current modes of censorship.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Expurgation of nude art became common after the Renaissance. Photograph: Alamy

Following the relative freedom of the Renaissance period, expurgation of nude art became common, with a literal fig leaf often used to cover genitalia – arguably the most famous instance of which was the plaster leaf used to cover a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David in London in the 1850s.

According to the Victoria & Albert Museum, “[t]he plaster cast of a fig leaf, half a metre high, was made in London soon after the statue’s arrival and attached to the statue to spare the blushes of visiting female dignitaries”.

But as censorious as fig leaves may be, one key aspect differentiates them from modern censorship. Whereas a fig leaf merely covers up a portion of a nude artwork, modern digital censorship removes all traces. The art is, in effect, disappeared.

To push the analogy further: Facebook is not only the museum owner, it also the curator and regulatory authority.

Still, companies that host public content have the legal leeway and a number of motivations for banning nudity. But what about private platforms?

Several years ago, the internet was abuzz with news that Microsoft SkyDrive – a cloud hosting service – had disabled a photographer’s paid account for storing content that violated the company’s code of conduct, namely, on nude photography. Though the company has since clarified their policy (legal nude content may be uploaded, but not shared), the implications of a private hosting service regulating nudity could be huge.

That is to say: in a world where even private commercial services ban nudity as a form of expression, the result is undoubtedly self-censorship.

So what is an artist to do?

Here, history is instructive. In the past, when a photographer picked up prints from the shop and found images conspicuously missing, her alternative was to learn to develop her own photographs. The modern parallel is to use non-commercial hosting, be it on one’s own private server, an alternative hosting platform, or a service like WordPress that doesn’t impose restrictions on its users.

But although these circumvention techniques may be easier than learning to use a darkroom, they don’t change the fact that the spaces we perceive to be and treat as our commons are slowly eroding our freedom of expression.

Not only are we entirely prevented from seeing the art on display in the virtual “museum”, we are denied cues as to how decisions are made about the art’s display. Despite being the main driver of profit for these companies, the user lacks all control over their own content. Even inside a closed network, we are still denied the opportunity to opt out of morality policing. If we want more control over what we can post and see, then we must fight for more control over the platforms we use every day.