On the Saturday after Christmas the entrance to the headquarters in Palo Alto, California, of Facebook, the social networking site that has 140m users worldwide, was the venue for a supersized nativity scene as breastfeeding mothers gathered in protest. The so-called nurse-in was held in support of another young mother, Kelli Roman, whose profile picture had been removed by the Facebook moderator because it showed her suckling her baby.

The group she has started – called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene” – now has more than 97,600 members. That’s rather fewer than the 1m or so members of the group called “I secretly want to punch slow walking people in the back of the head” but Roman says it is growing. It is now staging an online nurse-in, in which everybody – male or female, lactating or not – is invited to post a breastfeeding picture on their Facebook profile.

Facebook’s spokesman, Barry Schnitt, says the censorship of Roman’s breastfeeding photo is part of its antinudity policy. He said: “Breastfeeding is a natural and beautiful act and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook. We take no action on the vast majority of breastfeeding photos because they follow the site’s terms of use. Photos containing a fully exposed breast do violate those terms and may be removed. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children over the age of 13 who use the site. The photos we act on are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain.”

Facebook also bans pictures showing nipple, areola or “gluteal cleft” (bum cleavage, as was). Of course, this policy has originated in the United States, where the flash of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the 2004 Super Bowl caused a national furore. Any child in Britain can get all the areolas he or she wants in the nation’s most popular daily newspaper.

I wonder how many people in Facebook HQ sit on the working committee on nipple exposure. When exactly does “a natural and beautiful act” become something that endangers the moral wellbeing of 13-year-olds?

I have seen the offending photograph of Roman; there is not even a smidgen of nipple visible, and the baby’s head obscures any mammary flesh. I suspect that Facebook’s Mrs Grundys are precisely the kind of computer-fondling overgrown adolescents whose instinctive reaction to a picture of a woman suckling a child – as opposed to, say, Jordan before the breast reduction – is to say: “Uugghh, gross.”

This is morality as defined by the Knocked Up generation: breastfeeding is not cool, whereas sites that invite people to sign up as fans of mafia godfathers in Italy have been allowed to operate without censure. One site dedicated to Salvatore Riina, 78, who is serving 12 life sentences for murder, has more than 2,000 subscribers, who left him messages wishing him a happy Christmas, told him he was “great” and even posted videos praising him.

I guess the irony-laden dudes at Facebook judged this site and the many others like it to be harmless postmodern fun along the lines of the mafia comedies Analyze This and Married to the Mob, and therefore not a moral hazard to the 13-year-old denizens of Facebook – unlike the picture of Roman feeding her baby.

While the idea of Facebook as a moral arbiter is preposterous, you also have to wonder what makes a new mother decide to post a picture of herself feeding her baby for the delectation of her Facebook friends. Heather Farley, a 23-year-old from Utah who led the Palo Alto nurse-in and has been a member of Facebook for four years (400 friends), offers the explanation that as the mother of a nine-month-old, “it is hard to get a picture of me when I am not nursing”. Perhaps, but doesn’t that suggest she might also be too busy to post pictures of herself and her baby for the world to see?

I breastfed both my children for a year, but at no point did I feel the urge to post pictures of myself doing so, not because I was in any way ashamed but because I couldn’t imagine sharing something so intimate with a gaggle of people I’ve bumped into electronically – and not because they might see my nipple but because I wouldn’t recognise most of them in the street. I wonder if Farley really knows her 400 friends on Facebook so well that she would be happy to have them all round to her house while she breastfed in front of them.

I think the truly disturbing thing about Facebook is not its attempts to impose normative values on its members but the way it blurs the line between public and private. Most people who sign up to Facebook will, in the first flush of enthusiasm, do anything to increase their friend tally. Short of running for office, it is after all the only way, postplayground, to quantify your popularity. I must admit I have clicked yes to people I have heard of only vaguely to bump up that vanity-boosting number; but as a result I long ago stopped posting anything that I wouldn’t be prepared to wear on a sandwich board in Oxford Street at the height of the sales. Facebook was invented by a student as a way of keeping in touch with his friends. When we enter the grown-up world (and there is nothing more grown-up than having a baby) it is time to real-ise there is more to life than an audience.

In my student days people took drugs because they were bored, or had too much money, or too little, or because their friends did. Today so prevalent is the illegal practice among students of taking brain-enhancing prescription-only drugs such as Ritalin to improve their exam performance that leading academics have called in the scientific journal Nature for the drugs to be available over the counter.

“Why should there be anything more morally wrong about taking a brain-enhancing drug than eating proper food or getting a good night’s sleep?” they ask.

I am not a scientist but there must be a difference between good food and sufficient sleep and a drug that is prescribed to children with attention deficit hyper-activity disorder. If there isn’t, why do the drugs exist in the first place?

I find the idea of students scoring just so they can raise their scores quite depressing. What happened to that fine student tradition of watching Tele-tubbies while off your head? No wonder daytime TV audiences are plummeting if students are giving up class As for straight As.

Rachel Johnson is away

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