January 1, 2009 | 11:38 pm

Facebook rules nix breast-feeding pix

Posted by Adam Wills

Facebook has been taking heat for removing photos of women breast-feeding from members’ profiles. The social network site says the photos violate its Terms of Use. But these moms are fighting back. Last Saturday, Dec. 27, some 10 lactivists staged a protest, singing, chanting and breast-feeding their children in front of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters.

The New York Times blog Motherlode picked up the story a few weeks ago:

In the summer of 2007, Kelli Roman’s Facebook photo disappeared from her profile. It showed her nursing her infant daughter, Ivy, and while Facebook never responded when she wrote to ask why, she assumes it was because someone complained that the photo was obscene. Other mothers, she’s since learned, have received e-mails from Facebook warning they risked being banned from the site if their breastfeeding photos were put back.

Ms. Roman started a Facebook group — Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene — and slowly other women gathered there with similar tales. Over the months, membership grew, and is now 54,000. [As of New Year’s Day, the number had grown to 110,226 members.] Facebook’s policies don’t appear to have changed, however, and while not all the group’s members have personally been censored, reports of nursing photos being removed are still coming in.

There is also a collection of such photos on the group’s page — examples of the ones that were removed from personal pages — and there, too, the policy seems random. Some of the pictures posted as examples of what’s being taken down, were themselves taken down, according to Stephanie Knapp Muir, the administrator of the group, while others have been allowed to stay. Oddly, the photo on the group’s homepage is of Roman and her daughter, the one Facebook removed from her page last summer. (You can therefore decide for yourself whether it is obscene.) It has not been removed this second time around.

“We’re really unsure about what specifically triggers action,” says Muir, who is a doula in Ottawa where she lives with her four children, ages five through 25. Based on the stories women tell on the site, the assumption is that the company doesn’t just trawl around looking for pictures of women breastfeeding, but will respond to a complaint by another member.

“There’s mums on the group who’ve had photos removed with no nipples showing, no aereola showing, with less breast visible than you would see in an evening gown or a bathing suit or a beer ad,” Muir says. “Because this is so arbitrary and random it seems as if the objection is to breastfeeding itself.” Her own profile photo shows her nursing her youngest child years ago. It has not been taken down from her page.

The Mercury News reported that Facebook has removed these photos from members’ albums and profiles, saying that displays of areola — the dark skin around the nipple — violate the company’s policy regarding “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” material. Facebook also threatened to terminate the members’ accounts. The social-networking site MySpace also has deleted photos of babies nursing from exposed breasts.

Facebook says its policies are designed to ensure its Web site remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many teenagers who use the site.

To decide what’s appropriate, the company had to decide “how much of someone’s butt must be showing or, in this case, how much of the breast. We’ve made a visible areola the determining factor. It is a common standard,” said spokesman Barry Schnitt.

Facebook takes no action on the vast majority of breast-feeding photos, Schnitt said. “We agree that breast-feeding is natural and beautiful and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook.’‘

Ada Cahoun of Time magazine pointed out that it would be perfectly OK to post photos of a shirtless Obama at the beach on your Facebook page, areola and all. “And perhaps the surest sign that ‘pregnant man’ Thomas Beatie, has been accepted as a man — even though he still has female sex organs and the ability to deliver a baby — is the fact that his nipples, the same ones he had when he was a woman, are suddenly O.K. to look at,” Cahoun wrote.

Cahoun reports that Topfree Equal Rights Association (TERA), a Canadian group, is assisting the moms with their cause.

There are two problems,” says Paul Rapoport, coordinator for TERA, which has been advocating that women should not be penalized for going topless since 1997. “First, Facebook removes photos arbitrarily. Second, its policy clearly implies that visible nipples or areolas always make photos of women obscene. Facebook stigmatizes breast-feeding and demeans women.”

Facebook counters that it is far from the only organization steering clear of Areola City. “Could I place an ad related to breast-feeding that showed a woman breast-feeding a child but exposed her full breast in TIME or on your website?” asks spokesman Barry Schnitt. “During the course of this protest, I’ve called many media organizations and asked them this question. Not a single one has said yes.”

Associate Press reports that under-18 set are the likely inspiration for Facebook and similar sites to pull breast-feeding photos:

While Schnitt said Facebook’s policies predate a recent push by law enforcement agencies to better protect children from online predators, the whole field of Web hangouts may be skittish about anything that might expose kids to nudity, said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the free-speech watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Facebook already curtails the activities of some members based on age and the networks they belong to. For example, adults can’t look at profiles of kids under the age of 18, even if they’re members of the same regional network.

[John Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in Internet issues,] suggests a middle ground might emerge, in which networking sites like Facebook can better satisfy diverse constituencies without creating strife. That will require honing the technology to make it more certain that only people within specific networks and groups could see, say, a breast-feeding photo, while keeping children from seeing nudity.

Palfrey describes the goal as making “a site that is good for everyone, or good for the largest number of people, rather than the fewest.”

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