Women are often at the centre of controversies regarding online censorship. Removed photos or deleted accounts are frequent, even if the community guidelines are respected. The cause is that some aspects of the female body, such as menstruation, are still not accepted. This stress test has the aim to examine if online censorship on different platforms hits women's and men's similar photos equally.
Main Findings
Women’s photos are more censored than men’s photos: platforms censored 13 out of 18 images for the female category, while they censored only 3 out of 12 images for the male category.
The most censored category is “exposed body”: 7 out of 9 photos in this group were censored at least once. Platforms censored all women’s images in this category.
DeviantArt, Flickr, Spreely, Vero, Vkontakte, Linkedin and The Dots didn’t censor any photo. Among the others, WeHeartIt is the platform that censored the most: it removed 15 photos in total, 13 in the female category and 2 in the male one.
There are three main types of censorship applied on the platforms: removed image (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tagged, WeHeartIt), hidden image (Tumblr) and sensitive content warning (Twitter).
Unlike men’s nipples, women’s nipples are considered sexual and inappropriate content. Moreover, two platforms (Tagged and WeHeartIt) censored them even if they were covered.
Censorship also affects objects that resemble some parts of the human body: 4 out of 6 photos in this category were censored once by Tagged or WeHeartIt.
Protocol
