This one is a little outside of my usual postings of Marketing and sales related topics, but I thought its a great one since a PR storm has brewed as a result.
Facebook has taken on a war against nipples. Well, maybe not nipples per say, but apparently they don’t like breast feeding pictures. It seems they have removed pictures of women breast feeding according to a Time Magazine article.
According to the article, Facebook received some blow back when a 23 year old from California named Kelli Roman had her breast feeding picture taken down and decided to challenge them a bit. She has since become a champion for change against Facebook stating that breast feeding isn’t obscene.
So I started wondering what all the hub bub was and to check it out. The first thing I did was Google “Facebook and nipples.” Apparently, I’m not the only one talking about this. There are already tons of posts on this subject from people of both sides. Facebook wins for the PR they are receiving as a result of this situation.
I looked over Facebook’s acceptable use policy and I didn’t see the word “nipple” specifically written as objectionable. They have general policies that say that users can’t post “objectionable” material. Other articles are saying that Facebook states that no part of the nipple or areola can be seen in pictures. While I don;t see it myself (granted, I didn’t dig too deep on the Facebook site), I came up with an idea.
I decided to see what would happen if I purposely posted a picture of my own nipple. What you see above is the actual picture I posted first as my profile picture and then just left it as a regular picture. I even tagged my friends in the photo to give it some viral buzz (and I’m sure they will be just thrilled that I dragged them into this).
Well, I just did this yesterday to see what would happen. Is it art or obscene for me to do this? What if I told you one of the nipples was actually my wife’s? Would you believe me? Maybe the different one is a random picture of a another guy or girl from some topless beach pic I picked off Google Image search. Either way, does that then make it obscene? Where is the line of obscenity? Do we even really know? Does Facebook?
Well, I’ll let you know what happens with my little experiment in due time. Feel free to run your own experiments and let me know.
For those of you who are curious, I made it by taking a picture of my chest and then using PhotoShop, cropping out the nipple to a new file and spelling the letters “F” and “B” for Facebook.
photo credit: Kirkjufellsfoss_2016 via photopin (license)