Social Media Censorship: The Community Reacts

If you're a naturist content creator or just anyone who likes to share advice, experiences, or thoughts about naturism online, the terms "shadowbanning", "Facebook jail", "content removal", and the most unfortunate one, "total ban", probably make all the hairs on your body come straight up.

It's an endless cat-and-mouse game in which we, the content creators try to adjust to the tight rules of social media (and maybe bend them here and there) and they, the platform owners, punish us for never being compliant enough.

Censorship on social media seems to come in waves, sometimes they leave us alone for months and just when we're starting to feel relaxed, they reappear. Often because they made a tweak to their algorithms. For the last several months, it has been Meta's hot breath that we've been feeling in our necks. On an almost daily basis, Facebook posts are being removed. Often several ones per day.

This has to stop

We are not alone in this, every naturist content creator, naturist club, naturist resort, naturist federation, and individual naturist who shares this part of their lives on Facebook noticed the change. Yet another witch hunt had started. But this time, the community wouldn't just suck it up.

The International Naturist Federation decided to react. They wrote an open letter to the directors of Meta, explaining what naturism is and why censorship of non-sexual nudity doesn't just hurt our community but encourages mental health issues and negative body image on a worldwide scale. They demanded that this witch hunt would stop and that once and for all, the naked body would be seen as something natural, something human.

This letter, signed by organisations of over 30 countries, was simultaneously sent to the Meta offices, published on the INF-FNI website, and released to the press. Of course, we and everyone else were hoping that the media would pick it up. We could imagine a million catchy headlines: "Naked protest against Facebook", "Will Facebook go nude?", "Nude is not rude: Naturists challenge social media restrictions". Every journalist knows that these articles will be read. But then something happened that nobody expected.

Mark Zuckerberg announces less censorship

Barely hours after the INF letter must have arrived at the Meta offices, Mark Zuckerberg, inventor and face of Meta, made a rare appearance on Instagram, that other Meta platform. With a serious face he looked straight into the camera to say that Meta has become too strict, that their moderation is too harsh, and their censorship too strong.

For a split second, we thought "This can't be true… Is he really replying?...". He was not. It soon became obvious that the sudden change of direction was largely a political choice. But this doesn't have to be a bad thing, right? In the end, it doesn't matter if it was organised international naturism or the newly elected American president who pushed Meta in this direction. As long as the direction is beneficial for us. Well… that wasn't exactly the case either.

Meta's new direction

Long story short, Mark Z announced that he would get rid of fact-checking. Very similar to what happened to Twitter the moment it became X. Under the concept of free speech, they will allow everyone to share their own opinion, even if it's controversial or downright untrue. What to make from it will be up to the reader.

It's important to understand that this is only about moderation of the narrative and that this doesn't necessarily apply to the Community Standards. These say specifically that nudity is not allowed on the Meta platforms and Mark's speech didn't indicate that any changes to these standards should be expected. What this does mean is that now we should be allowed to talk freely about naturism, without visualising it. Which wasn't always the case in the past.

But there's a huge caveat. As there won't be any fact-checking anymore, literally anything can freely be said about naturism. If someone now shares an article that claims that the whole concept of non-sexual social nudity is a hoax and that naturist resorts are in fact very sexual places, there won't be anyone to double-check the truth. There won't be a button that you can press to mark this statement as false. There won't be anything to do about this.

It's way too early to predict the actual consequences though and we don't like to be negative about things we can't know yet. What is certain is that the balance between this new concept of "free speech" on social media and the Community Standards will have to be tested and that this is likely to lead to even more confusion and inconsistencies in moderation.

Who cares?

The timing of Mark Zuckerberg's message wasn't particularly beneficial for the open letter. Although we are certain that many journalists would have loved to write a piece about naturist protest, it just didn't weigh up against a message from Meta's big chief himself about how the way we have to interpret information is likely to change forever. That Zucks. (sorry, we really wanted to make this joke).

We are very aware that because we are content creators ourselves, our opinions can be very biased. So what we like to do in cases like this is have a look around and think about other people. When all of this was happening, we were at a naturist resort in the south of Spain. We went to the poolside bar and looked at the naturists around us. How much would they know about social media censorship? How many of them have been in Facebook jail? How many feel the need to share naturist content on social media?

The answer: Probably not that many. The everyday visitor of a naturist resort may consume content about naturism on social media but has little idea of the struggle to put it there. They might notice if eventually it disappears, but even then they'll move to other places to find their information.

United naturism finally unites

We may want to ask the question: Was it really worth it? Was it worth the time to organise this campaign, to write the letter, to review it, to talk about it, to tweak it, to sign it? Was it worth the stamps to send it all the way to Silicon Valley?

The answer: Very much. Sometimes it's important to fight even when the odds are against you. The letter exists, it's out there, on the internet and somewhere in California. Who knows who may read it in the future?

More importantly, never before have we seen organised naturism this united. One letter, signed by organisations of over 30 countries. Some organisations aren't even part of the International Naturist Federation. One of them was a human rights organisation. Even if this letter doesn't cause the smallest breach in the dam, organised naturism has proven that they can be one big front and this might be of huge benefit in the future.