What Facebook Is Actually Afraid Of

Facebook’s content moderation reveals its priorities with unusual clarity. Islamic State recruitment videos: tolerated for years, addressed slowly and reluctantly. Boko Haram propaganda: present and persistent. A woman’s nipple: account suspended, image removed, enforcement swift and certain. By Zuckerberg’s revealed logic, a bare breast is more dangerous to society than a beheading video, and that tells you exactly who these platforms were built for and whose comfort they’re designed to protect.

Women in Iceland got tired of it and joined the #FreeTheNipple campaign—posting topless photos and daring Instagram to do something about it. The argument is not complicated: men post shirtless photos freely. Women can’t. The anatomical distinction being enforced amounts to an inch of areola, and the enforcement is nakedly about controlling female bodies rather than protecting anyone from anything.

One of them put it more precisely than most editorials managed: I find it interesting that society doesn’t care when the media sexualizes women, when men sexualize women, when schools and the government sexualize women. But the moment women want to control their own sexuality, it’s wrong and disgusting.

The honest reading of platform policy is that female bodies are acceptable content when men are doing the looking and men are setting the terms. The second a woman is the agent of her own image, it becomes obscene. That’s not a content policy. That’s a control policy. And it took a group of Icelandic women posting topless selfies to make that distinction impossible to look away from.