Nudes and N00dz

this is the role of the community who citizens

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so everyone with that I am and arriving at its uh in front of a group called the club and this is and Gillian York and I'm a member of the bladder and then also the director for international freedom of expression and the fast Electronic Frontier Foundation so what we're talking about

today is how social media specifically Facebook because we found that they have the strictest policies around this topic and how the social media companies center art and specifically nude art and we believe that you got is an important part of our culture important part of our history and important part of our present at so this these just as an example is something that I successfully posted on Facebook just a few days ago now of course because this is the man this is a famous painting about painting sorry sculpture he accepted throughout the world as high art therefore Facebook thinks that it's OK for you to post this

however my so that can example this is the piece that was published on February 2016 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art it's a piece that was on exhibition drain pop art exhibition and retrospective this piece was uh band and the lead off of Facebook and they said due to the quote excessive amount of skin so we found that the painting was too sexy for Facebook but that they should be what all my double and so this is another 1 again like distance give you example what's being blocked this is from the Centre Pompidou they had a retrospective of this you know photographer and because the nipples were shown by the piece was removed as well as the community it was actually the 2nd time the museum has had abandoned and they left a note after they were um released in the community after 24 hours that they said what we will not publish news in the future so what can you and what is the need while so Facebook

says that they remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed but products they also restrict some images of female breast which include the nipple but they say we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breast feeding or showing rests with postmastectomy stars OK so they might up the rules clearly and they told us what we can and we cannot post the

exact lying because here is an image by an artist a tattoo artist in the black protect you and a photograph or both by her there any black and she's incredible she does that tattoo for women who have had mastectomies and social do whatever you like I've seen 1 of the beautiful great crossing where the stars were across them around them and this is a photo realistic tattoo nipple that she did and for a woman who had a mastectomy and any black has found that the content is regularly taken down from Facebook and other communities as well as further post it have received grants from the website from 24 hours to 30 days depending on the content that they posed and how many previous offences they've had on and i'll get to the band a little bit later because there's more interesting things there but I think this is a really good example of how the rules don't really actually matter even after they've been spelled

out and so again this is another example of a photographer who did a project and wanted to start a community for women to accept the bodies most pregnancy and postpartum uh it was specifically around breast feeding in the act of breastfeeding to establishes community received multiple of e-mails from people within in the community and was ultimately taken down uh by Facebook as a whole uh another similar example is

an artist name Patrick Collins who works primarily on Instagram she had a images remove that were not of rape or violence or the but rather uh pubic hair because she chose a picture of herself in a bikini where she hadn't properly

wax and they took this down and what's interesting to think about is kind of the contrast in the dichotomy that you look at when you see people

like for example justin beaver is a major movies more money surveyors standards that and the states have seen only is of that kind I so he did a campaign for a Calvin Klein uh the ads put already exceed the major billboards online but with the difference that they actually photoshop cubic here so again it comes down to this relationship women have with their bodies and what is considered acceptable or not acceptable based off of these corporate censorship rules and norms and it will certainly affect women disproportionally as well as transgender people and other people who fit outside of the gender norm because Facebook decide based on what the breast looks like not who would actually belongs to and so we've seen examples were transmat introns women have had photos taken down we've even seen examples where and prostatic enables that looked real enough the a photo taken down that this is a really fantastic campaign was that of a pink ribbon Germany and it was called check before it's removed which just in case anyone didn't catch that but they're talking about both checking your breasts forever and mumps infer possible cancer but also of before it's removed from social media and so they put this up there intentionally designed these photos that fit perfectly on your Facebook wall at Twitter and encourage people to actually break the rules and and what happens with that I posted this very image to Facebook and and because it was my 2nd offense I was banned for 24 hours from the site don't tell you what that's like because here we've spoken to the media quite a bit the last couple days and I made the mistake of reading the comments at her and 1 of the things that I

found was that I don't understand facebook it's

not the internet it doesn't really matter you can go somewhere else but what I found I was banned was not only that I couldn't post Facebook or send messages to my contacts which might seem fairly insignificant I also couldn't administer pages that I run for my job I couldn't

use Spotify which I pay for it I couldn't use tinder I couldn't comment on the Huffington Post which uses Facebook stamens and so an entire world was cut off for me not just my Facebook network out there for me it was only 24 hours but I run a project called online censorship on that collects reports from individuals and if you're ever censored these succumbed to us and

we collect reports from individuals who have experienced takedowns of content at account deactivations on social networks and from those reports we've learned that these bands can extend to 30 days and that they can be issued repeatedly and so while terrorism might support for terrorism might get your account taken down immediately violating the rules against nudity seems to result in band after band after band and so people regularly break this role will find themselves cut off for 30 days at a time just over over again indefinitely there's no reset button this is another example of an artist uh project that was actually removed from Instagram again Instagram is on my Facebook uh so she was looking at how you demystify period um 50 % the world experienced this uh we have dates and weddings indications that we we work around these things but it's nothing that anyone really talks about so again it's a fully clothed woman because of something in the image the entire image was removed as well as for accounts an instrument on my Facebook and 1 of the other things that I've seen from a working over the years is that different bodies are treated in different ways many people oppose the Bikini shots Instagram that some of the that content that I've seen taken down has been larger woman wearing bikini so they'll have their photos taken down the skinny women will not and there's quite a bias there nothing but also says that they allow photographs of paintings sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures as we saw the Venus de Milo perfectly fine high art classic everyone knows what it is but what happens when you post lesser-known art anyone person I'm guessing if you're American or maybe over so this is this is the art of the she started a TV show called The Golden Girls shows on a wonderful career before that but this was about that error of this is a new painting from 1991 called newbie Arthur I by John current and this was my 1st offense as the last fall in that politics conference I gave a talk and just after this that happened I posted this image and and my I asked my friends to please report on me because the way that Facebook works is that

it encourages you to snitch on your friends so I ask my friends to do this they reported it and the result was that the photo was taken down I wasn't then for any period of time but the photo was gone and I couldn't read posted so it was successfully appealed that decision but it's still

counted against me isn't so Facebook has uh approximately 1 . 4 billion users and when you think about this in the context of the countries or states they typically also have been more power and social capital than any

country or came state or anything in the world at so this is a project I did and in the video and involved and 13 in collaboration with someone and in improbable CEO who is

an artist and professor out of the

school of art in Chicago

so how many of you have been to porn sites 9 although you on the way there and I

was not and labeled so at this

time with this project we actually were really interested in exploring kind of the taboos place of the Internet were a lot of people don't admit to they go to the majority of us do have frequent quite often so is there

not too much on a site called can form it's

site where it's not just read only born as I like to call it but it's really right once you can

actually interact with people 3 chat

windows so we start to ask them to and we give them images of really iconic well known as kind pieces of art and ask them if they could emulate that and we create for

us for a small amount of money so we're trying to kind of questions used to go around these questions

about what is 1 versus art and what is the verses and manufactured you do your

real beauty and how do these things have juxtaposed when you when you see what is considered

and over the you know masses as art versus on that so

this piece is also shown in 2013 in York um during a thing called Internet

we so you think New York is very variable part of the US and peace was put up and then a few days the uh Google was next to us and decided to have it taken down so it comes down to this question of its 2013 it's the future like resources jet packs school such be happening were still debating this for um moral question of like what is our what is formed is the difference in how you do need those things and so we looked at I guess it really can enter the question of like who makes the decisions and how can you fruit when when you can't because when Google pulled down the work in exhibition um I tried to find it I argue that and there is ultimately no 1 I can speak to and that was being physically present so it was really a wake-up call about and how the online transitions to the real so to that question who does decide I think it's worth looking at the statistics of these companies to see who's working there who's making these decisions now and some of you may have seen Sarah Roberts talk yesterday and she talked about content moderation in who the people are actually

making the judgment on that I think that that's a big part of it but so is whoever makes the decisions at the top of and in this case as you can see this is Facebook's and that I don't know if you can actually see that well so just read a little bit of this is the US as staff of Facebook and they're the breakdown of ethnicity 55 per cent of white 36 per cent are Asian and everyone else is under 4 per cent and in terms of men and women we don't have that slide here but it's over 70 per cent men in leadership positions and the national policy and technology as far as we can tell and so what that says to me now you know I don't think necessarily that these proof that these are people who you know believe that nudity is wrong but this is so ingrained in American culture we have it in the way the films are regulated way their television is regulated and the problem here is that Facebook as an American company is making these decisions for the entire world but

this is interesting because what they say about that is that they restrict the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content particularly because of the cultural background or h now if I can read between the lines here what I think they're saying is we don't want the government of Saudi Arabia to block us it's a real threat and I think economically what these companies see is we have to create this this flat doll global standard for speech that allows everyone to be happy about what is let's say we're teaching our children and that nudity is wrong women can be topless but men can and

when I leave you with this slide here this is a picture and from the land about 3 days ago and there wasn't a lot if you walked around recently you've probably seen this poster for local art exhibition and and I was sitting in a cafe and I noticed the poster and I decided to watch and you didn't see if they didn't see a single parent cover the child I've because it's find it's acceptable so why is it OK industry in Berlin but not on Facebook global platform that we all use why do we wanna teach people this double standard of women's bodies why do we want a treaty bodies like pornography and I would even go a step further with what we've been talking about say why is pornography even wrong so as an artist at also I think really

important but again like would join was bringing up uh um as artists and cultural capital creators and you start to think about the implications of this and then do you make music do you put them online do you expose them to a community of 1 . 4 billion and what are the implications of that being deleted so your personal factors to your circles and everything of course we recognize that there are concerns around security is well we know that there's a talk tomorrow the recommended 1 of her own and the speaker's Regeneron encoding rates yeah right there you go is that and you should

definitely be the docks sends a few and but if you'd like to talk to us a little bit more you welcome to we'd like to open the floor for questions about our view and this time look at the Hi there might and that and we thank you thank you that was really interesting from what would you

recommend as an eternity in a tentative guidelines or should there be guidelines at all I know IDA know your parents and at me as a parent I wouldn't want the internet to to be the 1 that no more that moderators for better or worse the whole concept of of nudity and sexuality to my children

so do you have an idea of an eternity ultimately guidelines or the or is that more of appropriation I mean as for me so my son and it's it's becoming starting to become a question because he is becoming fluent in language enough to start navigating 11 and so on but ultimately I don't see

necessarily a difference between the online in the real so it's a question of does his friends online show it to them orders discovery with his friends socially in real because when I was younger like we would find the warning in our friends of parents draw and I was like I

discovered sex so I don't really necessarily from ECA huge difference between the 2 so from my perspective I think there are a couple things that we could realistically do to make this a little bit better than the first one is treat women's and men's bodies the same and it's fine if they decide for example that they don't want to show anything below the waist I they do that find treatment that in women's bodies saying but right now they're not doing that and the essentially perpetuating the sexism and teaching it to the next generation and the other thing I would say is that other companies like YouTube rather than completely banning the they interstitial that says you must be 18 with through and you have to a YouTube account presumably for apparent that would be enough of a barrier to make sure that you're for example you make sure that your child has the right account that they have the settings clicked in Figure also about child settings the parents consent up I would be fine with

all of those things I don't find that to be censorship but I think that blanket banning it is what's really problematic to me hi I was wondering whether useful to be a good idea to have like nationally based algorithm that uh tried to implement

local norms and so that you don't have 1 global standard I so I sort of

torn on this and because I am sensitive to the fact that there are some places where no 1 wants to see what I actually believe that I think that everyone wants to see this but I believe that you know there are some places where it's treated differently and at the same time I I believe in 1 Internet and I believe in global Internet that is for everyone so that I know that you know that not everyone will agree with that that's fine but but I think that it would be really wants you institute algorithm like that is to say OK now we're going to bed images of women entirely in this country that would not be acceptable to me and so treating cultures differently in that sense rather than giving people the autonomy and responsibility and for themselves and their children and families I I would be skeptical are there more questions OK then

I say thank you Jillian ends at the low pulse thank my my a man who