Facebook Nudity Policy Draws Nursing Moms' Ire

This undated photo provided by Kelli Roman shows her breastfeeding her daughter Ivy. Facebook...

This undated photo provided by Kelli Roman shows her breastfeeding her daughter Ivy. Facebook removed the photo from Roman's page after she had posted it, citing the company's policy barring people from uploading anything obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit" _ a policy that translates into a ban on pictures depicting certain amounts of exposed flesh.

(Kelli Roman/AP Photo)

Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites' community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members.

Facebook began as a site just for college kids, but now it is an online home for 140 million people from all over the world. Among the new faces of Facebook are women like Kelli Roman, 23, who last year posted a photo of herself nursing one of her two children.

One day, she logged on to find the photo missing. When she pressed Facebook for an explanation, she got form e-mails in return.

Facebook bars people from uploading anything "obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit" — a policy that translates into a ban on pictures depicting certain amounts of exposed flesh.

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Roman responded by starting a Facebook group called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!"

"There is nothing about bottle-feeding a child that has to be discreet," said Roman, who lives in Fallbrook, Calif., in an interview. "With breast-feeding, it should be the exact same way."

Today the group — part petition, part message board, part photo-sharing hub — has more than 97,600 members.

One of them, Stephanie Muir of Ottawa, was new to Facebook when she stumbled across the group last year. Muir, a mother of five, does volunteer work related to public health and breast-feeding and said the issue is important to her.

"I think it's time we all get over this notion that women's breasts are dangerous and harmful for children to see," she said. So she organized a Facebook protest last weekend against the site's policies, which she believes are arbitrarily enforced and discriminate against women.

Muir said more than 11,000 people participated in the group's "virtual nurse-in" by swapping out their regular profile pictures on Facebook and uploading ones depicting breast-feeding.