Decapitation Is Fine, but Don’t You Dare Show a Nipple

Someone on Facebook found a video of a masked man beheading a woman in Mexico. They reported it. Facebook reviewed it and decided: this stays up. Around the same time, a woman posted a photo of herself breastfeeding her child. Facebook took it down and suspended her account. That’s the policy. That’s where they drew the line.

The company told the BBC that Facebook is a place where people share their experiences, including abuse, terrorism and violence. They’ll only step in, they explained, if the violence is being glorified. A beheading video is just people sharing their experiences. A nursing mother is obscene.

There’s a very specific strand of American puritanism at work here—the one that’s perfectly comfortable with gore and genuinely terrified of the human body doing something ordinary. You can watch a man die on your phone, but a breast doing what breasts biologically exist to do requires a warning, a takedown, a suspension. The solution Facebook is working on, by the way, is a popup. A little click-through before the murder video. That’s it. That’s the fix. The nursing photo stays gone.

I don’t know what’s more depressing: that this is the policy, or that nobody inside that company seems to find it particularly strange.