Oversight Board Selects a Case Regarding a Post Containing A Photo of a Topless Couple

In order to treat all users fairly and provide moderators and the public with a workable standard on nudity, Meta should define clear, objective, rights-respecting criteria to govern the entirety of its Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity policy, ensuring treatment of all people that is consistent with international human rights standards, including without discrimination on the basis of sex or gender identity. Meta should first conduct a comprehensive human rights impact assessment to review the implications of the adoption of such criteria, which includes broadly inclusive stakeholder engagement across diverse ideological, geographic and cultural contexts. To the degree that this assessment should identify any potential harms, implementation of the new policy should include a mitigation plan for addressing them.

Our commitment: We will conduct focused internal human rights due diligence on our Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity policy.

Considerations: In announcing its decision and recommendations in January, the board made clear that all users should be treated fairly and that our adult nudity policies should be enforced according to a “workable standard”, but did not issue a blanket policy prescription (e.g. “Free the nipple”) because they recognize that issues of safety, consent and dignity are also at play. We agree with the board’s guidance.

The policy principles for our Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity policy are those that apply to all of our content policies: voice, safety, privacy, authenticity, and dignity. In the case of adult nudity and sexual activity, however, is the wide variation in global attitudes towards, and reception of, such content; the multiple rights involved (e.g., respect of best interests of the child, dignity, and privacy); and the inherent challenge of defining attributes of sexualization or sexual activity that are consistent across cultures, languages, and can be applied at scale. We also want to offer our users positive experiences on our platforms and ensure we address spam and unwanted sexual content that are generally found elsewhere online.

In the past five years, we have updated this policy more than 13 times, with multiple policy development processes in order to address these issues. We’ve sought to understand the inherent risks of both removing and allowing such content. In doing so, we’ve consulted extensively and repeatedly with experts and rights holders, and implemented increasing nuance that seeks to differentiate medical, artistic, and political expressions of nudity and/or sexual activity from other forms, creating the detail and lists that the board has indicated was confusing.

We note this past work has repeatedly shown that allowing all forms of nudity at scale across all gender identities involves risks of severe negative impacts on privacy and dignity and may result in disparate gender impacts, including but not limited to the sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery. These negative human rights impacts and outing risks may be disproportionately severe for women, gender non-conforming, or non-binary individuals. We refer, in particular, to the Gender Dimensions of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which direct businesses to “always regard sexual harassment and gender-based violence as risks of severe human rights impacts”.

Recognizing the difficulties inherent in this policy area, we will conduct focused internal due diligence on this policy area. In doing so, we will use the UNGPs’ salience criteria, and review how our Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity policy has evolved. We will aim to use the results of this due diligence to inform potential policy changes, including any future policy development processes.

We will also take action to improve the consistency and clarity of guidance to users and content moderators, and will seek specialized guidance from our Civil Rights and Human Rights teams to rigorously uphold rights to non-discrimination. We will share an update on our progress in future Quarterly Updates.