404 Media neglected to link to her website, which is https://ada-ada-ada.art/
I have manboobs from when I was fat. I almost want to take a self-portrait and see what Instagram thinks.
You might be able to take downblouse cleavage shots to direct them to your OF.
If there’s a big enough market for hairy cleavage, it might be worth it!
Hey. If you can make bank out of it.
this is interesting as fuck
“I’m really interested in algorithmic enforcement …” Ada Ada Ada told me in an interview. “It seemed like the nipple rule is one of the simplest ways … because it’s set up as a very binary idea—female nipples no, male nipples, yes. But then it prompts a lot of questions: what is male nipple? What is a female nipple?”
She’s using her own journey as a trans person to document how AI tools like those used by Instagram identify potentially obscene material.
In most states, it’s legal to walk around toppless.
Most tribes walk around topless. Theyre teenagers aren’t mentally damaged by seeing nipples. Maybe someday, society will grow beyond christian values.
You mean Judaeo-Christian Islamic values. Let’s at least be inclusive here.
Abrahamic, they’re all sects of Abraham.
Sorry, wrong person response My bad. But the point stands.
I’m aware, I’m just pointing out that there’s a word for it.
That sadly, most wouldn’t “get” the point of.
But not all are “christian” as YOU put it…
In most states, it’s legal to walk around toppless.
However that doesn’t atop some Karen type from calling the police to come and harass you. And there’s no guarantee the cop that shows up won’t decide you are disturbing the peace or something.
Nor does it stop immature bros from being idiots about it and making the person feel unsafe.
Not in my state. In fact, you can’t even show underboob, because anything “the female breast below the top of the areola” is illegal. It’s legal in Alaska and a super conservative neighbor state, so why not my stupid state?
sign up to keep reading
No, no I don’t think I will
It’s annoying, but at least this is an independent, worker owned 4 man outfit that got its start when Vice went bankrupt.
Here is the article:
For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition.
Every week she uploads a shirtless self portrait to Instagram alongside another image which shows whether a number of AI-powered tools from big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft that attempt to automatically classify the gender of a person see her as male or female. Each image also includes a sequential number, year, and the number of weeks since Ada Ada Ada started hormone therapy.
In 2023, after more than a year into the project which she named In Transitu, Instagram removed one of Ada Ada Ada’s self portraits for violating Instagram’s Community Guidelines against posting nudity. We can’t say for certain why Instagram deleted that image specifically and whether it was a human or automated system that flagged it because Meta’s moderation systems remain opaque, but it was at that moment that Instagram first decided that Ada Ada Ada’s nipples were female, and therefore nudity, which isn’t allowed on the platform. On Instagram, shirtless men are allowed and shirtless women are also allowed as long as they don’t show nipples, so what constitutes nudity online often comes down to the perceived gender of an areola.
“I’m really interested in algorithmic enforcement and generally understanding the impact that algorithms have on our lives,” Ada Ada Ada told me in an interview. “It seemed like the nipple rule is one of the simplest ways that you can start talking about this because it’s set up as a very binary idea—female nipples no, male nipples, yes. But then it prompts a lot of questions: what is male nipple? What is a female nipple?”
In Transitu highlights the inherent absurdity in how Instagram and other big tech companies try to answer that question.
“A lot of artists have been challenging this in various ways, but I felt like I had started my transition at the end of 2021 and I also started my art practice. And I was like, well, I’m actually in a unique position to dive deep into this by using my own body,” Ada Ada Ada said. “And so I wanted to see how Instagram and the gender classification algorithms actually understand gender. What are the rules? And is there any way that we can sort of reverse engineer this?”
While we can’t know exactly why any one of Ada Ada Ada’s images are removed, she is collecting as much data as she can in a spreadsheet about which images were removed, why Instagram said they were removed, and to the best of her knowledge if the images’ reach was limited.

That data shows that more images were removed further into her transition, but there are other possible clues as well. In the first image that was removed, for example, Ada Ada Ada was making a “kissy face” and squeezing her breasts together, which could have read as more female or sexual. Ada Ada Ada was also able to reupload that same image with the nipples censored out. In another image that was removed, she said, she was wearing a lingerie bra where her nipples were still visible.
“But then again, you have this one where I’m wearing nipple clamps, and that didn’t do anything,” she said. “I would have expected that to be removed. I’ve also had another picture where I’m holding up a book, Nevada by the trans author Imogen Binnie. I’m just holding a book and that was removed.”
Ada Ada Ada also maintains a spreadsheet where she tracks how a number of AI-powered gender classifiers—Face++, face-api.js, Microsoft Azure’s Image Analysis, Amazon Rekognition, and Clarifai—are reading her as male or female.

Experts have criticized such gender classifiers for often being wrong and particularly harmful for transgender people. “You can’t actually tell someone’s gender from their physical appearance,” Os Keyes, a researcher at the University of Washington who has written a lot about automated gender recognition (AGR), wrote for Logic in 2019. “If you try, you’ll just end up hurting trans and gender non-conforming people when we invariably don’t stack up to your normative idea of what gender ‘looks like.’”
“I’ve definitely learned that gender classifiers are an unreliable and flawed technology, especially when it comes to trans people’s gender expression,” Ada Ada Ada said. “I regularly see my algorithmic gender swing back and forth from week to week. In extension to that, it’s also fascinating to see how the different algorithms often disagree on my gender. Face++ (which is a Chinese company) tends to disagree more with the others, which seems to suggest that it’s also a culturally dependent technology (as is gender).”
As Ada Ada Ada told me, and as I wrote in another story published today, continually testing these classifiers also reveals how they work in reality versus how the companies that own them say they work. In 2022, well into her project, Microsoft said it would retire its gender classifier following criticism that the technology can be used for discrimination. But Ada Ada Ada was able to continue using the gender classifier well after Microsoft said it would retire it. It was only after I reached out to Microsoft for comment that it learned that she and what Microsoft said was a “very small number” of users were still able to access it because of an error. Microsoft denied them access after I reached out for comment.
Another thing that In Transitu reveals is that, on paper, Instagram has a plain policy against nudity. It states:
“We know that there are times when people might want to share nude images that are artistic or creative in nature, but for a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram. This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks. It also includes some photos of female nipples, but photos in the context of breastfeeding, birth giving and after-birth moments, health-related situations (for example, post-mastectomy, breast cancer awareness or gender confirmation surgery) or an act of protest are allowed.”
But in reality, Instagram ends up removing content and accounts belonging to adult content creators, sex educators, and gender nonconforming people who are trying to follow its stated rules, while people who steal adult content or create nonconsensual content game the system and post freely. As 404 Media has shown many times, nonconsensual content is also advertised on Instagram, meaning the platform is getting paid to show it to users. It’s not surprising that trying to follow the rules is hard when users struggle to reverse engineer how those rules are actually enforced, and nonsensical for people who don’t fit into old, binary conceptions of gender.
I make an exception for one of the best tech outlets
Isn’t it free?
Ya it’ll be a cold day in hell before Instagram requires men to hide their nipples. Just shows how ingrained America’s views on sex, sexuality and gender are in Christianity.
But that would be worse?
The solution to women being treated unfairly is not to start treating men unfairly too. It’s to treat women fairly.
Christian tradition, sure, but the Bible doesn’t have much to say about nipples so any specific rule regarding them seems to be more of an inference than a command.
The Bible stopped being a real guide for American Christians the moment they landed on our coast
Technically correct, because they weren’t “American” before they landed.
They abandoned the Bible as a real guide long before that, though.
Isn’t the constitution the New New Testament.
Doesn’t stop them from using it as the “reason” for several rules
Ah yes, and then uses Jesus’ name in the same sentence as USA. The guy hated capitalism more than anything.
I read once that it had more to do with not seeing wealthy women’s nipples. For example wealthy women would hire a wet nurse to breast feed their babies. It was a way to show off wealth and social standing. So the hired help in the form of a wet nurse could show her breasts, but her wealthy employer would not because its beneath her.
So not showing breasts, even for the purpose of breast feeding became affiliated with wealth and power, whereas the inverse was true, showing breasts meant you could not afford to keep them covered.
And that’s not even including the influence of brothels and prostitution.
Let that cook for however many hundreds of years, mix in religion and you get whatever the fuck we have now.
It was an interesting theory and seemed to make sense to me. I’ll have to try to find the article later. I read it maybe 10 years ago so it might take some looking.
The Wikipedia article says historically wet nursing was available to all social classes, so that doesn’t really jive.
I wanted to find that article before I responded to you, but like I said it read about 10 years ago and not having much luck finding it.
But yes wetnurses were available to all women because not all women can produce breast milk.
If one poor woman’s baby is starving it was not uncommon for a friend or sister to fulfill that role to help them. Women were pregnant more frequently due to no birthcontrol. So a woman lactating was more common. However they weren’t hiring a wet nurse in the same way the wealthy were, and if a poor woman could feed her baby she would. A rich woman(almost) always hired a wet nurse regardless of her ability to produce milk.
What does the pope have to say about nipples? I’ve seen some in Christian art (didn’t touch myself to these, just in case), but didn’t realize there was an opinion on this?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads:
The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person." (C.C.C. # 2524)
People here are not serious, they repeat slogans and polemics very superficially. The nipple taboo is found across pre-Christian and non-Abrahamic societies, probably because of breasts’ association with fertility. I.e
When did bare breasts become taboo in Western civilization?
Probably around 3,000 years ago. Women are displayed with exposed breasts in Minoan artwork from 1500 B.C. Some historians believe that these ancient women went topless only during religious rituals—bare-breasted, buxom goddesses have been worshipped since the dawn of civilization—but some of the artworks depict everyday activities, suggesting that bare breasts may have been commonplace. Just across the Mediterranean, ancient Egyptian women sported elaborate dresses that could either cover the breasts or leave them exposed, depending on the whim of the designer. Over the next few centuries, however, breasts become strictly private parts. Ancient Athenian women were wearing flowing, multilayered robes that concealed the shape of the bosom by the middle of the first millennium B.C. Spartan attire was more risqué, exposing the female thigh, but breasts were always covered.
Small boobies = nipple ok
Big boobies = nipple not ok
Is what I think this Instagram is trying to say. I don’t agree and think let the boobies be free.
Would that mean censorship of moobs?
I think they call it “female-presenting”, so if it looks like female nipples to them, then they ban it.
Instagram is stupid anyway.
yeah, but this is about where that distinction is.
Removed by mod
Chill, friend. People die naturally and fade from memory, this is how we move on and progress. There are way too many issues at the same level of importance as the nipples in social media, and way too many ought to be terminated if we placed the line there.
In place of termination, I’d love to see education, practical activism and just good old time.
We’ll get there. The weirdos opposing mundane shit like nipples will die and fade naturally, and our efforts spent in education and activism will shift the larger tides such that new ones like them will get fewer and fewer each generation.
And since we are humans, new issues will arise, and we’ll fight them the same. They are, and always have been, doomed to die out with the rest of the ass-backwards ideas, this is what progress is.
And you can’t speed up progress with blood. That is how you slow it down. The ideas will root in the blood and refuse to fade like they should and as they eventually unavoidably will, with the temporal resistance brought up by the rushed show of force.
Let the fuckers fade out and be forgotten, as much as possible, as fast as possible, and help the process by being active. Be loud, be persistent, but be not violent.
Any and all violence has always been, and always will be, resisted eventually by a larger force. If the nipple-opposers (I.e conservatives) choose violence, that’ll only serve to speed up the progress for us, by the way of rising more forceful resistance, and after overcoming the oppression, having the majority to instantly implement changes with popular support.
Oppressors will never be popular in the long run, and the oppressor’s ideas are bound to die with them. Not for good, as we’ve seen with the rise of neo-nazism, but they’ll never again be as popular so as to rise into power without blood, and with blood, they’ll repeat the cycle of ultimately weakening themselves and their ideas out of existence for good. But in the short-term, the polar opposites of the oppressor’s ideas will gain flash popularity and those ideas will get rapidly implemented, thus speeding up the progress.
It’s complex and unintuitive, perhaps, but the history has shown that any and all attempts to speed up any ideological progresses by way of violence or oppression, has ultimately ended in those very ideas being in ruin, and the opposing ideas getting stronger, more persistent in their standing.
Though for a short while, those ideas will be in power, and a lot of bad stuff will happen. Even if the ideas should be good from our point of view. But that is just a temporary state, which will always end in resistance winning, and opposing ideas gaining standing and popularity.
This became a very tangential and random outburst, of which I’m not very proud, but I think it best to leave it up if not for anything else but to show everyone my unfounded idea of self-importance and a rambling, cringeworthy brain. Yikes. I’m fucking ashamed. But this is how I think, I suppose, maybe someone will set me straight.
I would offer clemency to any that woyld confess the sight of boobies is not in fact evil.
I agree violence is not the way but indecision and magnanimity is allowing the anti-human ideas to fester.
There are many tgat seem disgusted of their own human animal form and project it as hatred into society.
They imagine all sorts of harms from its sight alone. They create enormous hurdle to the simple act of touch. They invent rules and codes that keep us apart and separated.
I don’t even think they really know why, it is as thought they are ideologically possessed against our flesh itself. We must reject their virulent shame and self -hate with compassion as much as possible and with violence as much as necessary.
Thank you for letting out what was in your heart, I am touched to have sung with you internet stranger.
If women’s nipples are censored because they are considered sexual, men’s should be too. I know more than a few women who are sexuality aroused by topless men.
Why ban male nipples? Fuck that all nipples should be allowed.
That’s my point.
I was wondering but I guess I don’t understand why say it that way instead of the other way around.
To highlight the absurdity of the concept. I think the majority of people would agree that topless men should not be censored.
Gonna make a novelty insta devoted to hairy male nipples
Bet it can beat Tik Tok to a congressional ban
If you need some hairy male nipples to show off then let me know, I’ll contribute to the cause 😂
They’d love Newcastle https://www.taps-aff.co.uk/
Omg that is funny.
Do you have like a list or anything? Friend wants to know.
As a bloke who’s had his pecs groped in intimate acts, I would agree.
It is however worth mentioning that the sexualisation of the pecs and boobs is a man-made construction brought upon by Christian values and one day we may even move past those values and desexualise these body parts.
tits out for harambe
New passing meta just dropped
We really live in somebody’s dystopian fiction. Life imitates art.
Huh, I was honestly expecting something like https://youtube.com/watch?v=dcYlytyuKsc
Why are you using Instagram enough for this to even be a question?
… Because it all becomes Crab?
