FINALLY

Facebook and Instagram Free the Nipple—but Only for Trans and Nonbinary Users

The company will use “human reviewers” to assess users’ sex and gender identity to enforce the policy, according to Meta.

Meta’s Oversight Board, dubbed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the company’s “Supreme Court,” has decided it’s time to finally free the nipple on Instagram and Facebook—but only for some users. “The same image of female-presenting nipples would be prohibited if posted by a cisgender woman but permitted if posted by an individual self-identifying as non-binary,” the board clarified in its decision. The change to the long-standing policy comes after Instagram faced droves of complaints claiming the ban discriminated against transgender users. In the future, the company said it will rely on “human reviewers” to assess a user’s sex and gender identity, “as this policy applies to ‘female nipples,’” the board wrote. It will continue to examine “additional nipple-related exceptions based on contexts of protest, birth giving, after birth, and breastfeeding which it did not examine here, but also must be assessed,” the advisory board added.