Zuckerberg blasted for censorship of Pulitzer prize-winning photo

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12859686/facebook-censorship-napalm-girl-aftenposten

by kristofferR • 10 years ago

49 25 10 years ago

theverge.com

okket• 10 years ago

See also: "Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004 (13 hours ago, 175 comments)

stephenr3• 10 years ago

Evil mega corp does evil shit. News at 11.

Seriously. Stop it with the "dear mark" letters. Stop telling yourself Facebook can improve and it just needs to know what the community wants.

norswap• 10 years ago

Snarky commenter comments on the vanity of it all. It's so easy once you get started :)

stephenr3• 10 years ago

Im not being snarky. Im completely serious.

Facebook is a fucking cancer on society and technology. I imagine when Zuckerberg watches 007 Tomorrow Never Dies, he probably sees Elliot Carver as the ultimately unsuccessful hero.

enibundo• 10 years ago

Or just stop using facebook... thinks seriously of closing facebook for good

vidarh8• 10 years ago

Writing "dear Mark" letters and asking for them to improve, and then publishing the non-answers is an excellent way of showing others that Facebook won't improve.

vidarh8• 10 years ago

Norwegian Prime Minister has posted it on her official Facebook page in response to this too, and they removed that post as well.

EDIT: As well as the Norwegian Minister for Culture.

EDIT2: Here's an article about the PM posting it (in Norwegian; Google translate ought to do an ok job): http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/facebook-fjernet-ernas-bilde/...

thr0waway12393• 10 years ago

Excellent, that should teach those idiot Norwegians a thing or two about where they stand on the totem pole of power.

Facebook > Every other country on the planet

Facebook is a country because it is acts as an independent sovereign state which is not answerable to anyone at this point. Apparently, it already makes up its own taxation laws[1].I expect them to release their own flag, maybe a national anthem?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2016/07/29/face...

vidarh8• 10 years ago

As an "idiot Norwegian", I think you'll find Facebook better thread carefully here. They've now pissed off and censored multiple high level politicians, two of the largest national newspapers, and several high profile writers, pouring gasoline on a long simmering debate over whether they are a threat to democracy...

If they want e.g. to have Norwegian brands willing to be associated with and advertise on their platform, they'll need to step carefully, because they're getting dangerously close to it being a PR coup of higher value for companies to publicly announce they won't spend money on advertising on Facebook, than the return of actually advertising on Facebook.

Of course, they can live without the Norwegian market. What they can't live with would be if this debate also start taking off elsewhere. And this has already led to articles in a number of major international newspapers, and it will get a lot more attention before it subsides.

kartan• 10 years ago

I don't think that Zuckerberg/Facebook is to blame. The system that allows so much power in so few hands is to blame and should be improved.

The good thing about capitalist democracies used to be that the decision making was distributed between a large amount of actors. When you have an economy where most companies are monopolies/oligopolies you end with something closer to feudalism than to an actual democracy.

stephenr3• 10 years ago

Yeah, this is very much a case of 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.'

Facebook has shown its hand many times before, if you're still giving them content to attract products (i.e. eyeballs) to their platform, you're as much a part of the problem as Facebook itself.

SmallDeadGuy• 10 years ago

While I disagree with the censorship and removal of the entire post, I can't see why they couldn't reach a compromise where the photo is censored to either blur or obscure the nudity yet still retain the message. Keeping it obvious that Kim Phuc is nude, while actually censoring the specific nude areas that Facebook disallows, would retain the message and historical significance.

The approach Facebook should have taken was to remove/censor the photo itself but keep the post and all relevant discussion unmodified, until a photo/set of photos that abide by their terms was added to replace the offending images. The message isn't that Facebook is censoring war discussion and history, it's that some content of the images themselves are not permitted and that content should be what is censored.

DanBC• 10 years ago

I can't see why they couldn't reach a compromise

It's one of the most famous war photos ever. Facebook's photo rules are baffling. They've gone from allowing beheading videos and banning breastfeeding, to allowing breast feeding but banning a famous war photo.

vidarh8• 10 years ago

One of the articles posted to criticise the censorship actually as part of the criticism includes a version of the picture censored with a Facebook logo covering her genitals.

But I don't agree with you. The point is that this is part of a wider pattern where speech which is legal, and sometimes important (and sometimes not) is being unilaterally censored by Facebook.

This would have been fine when Facebook was small and inconsequential. But given their size, they now have a lot of power to reduce the dissemination of information. That makes the debate important.

A lot of countries, for example, has strict laws surrounding ownership of media in order to ensure that no single party can dominate the media landscape, or to restrict foreign influence on their media (e.g. the reason Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen is because of US media ownership restrictions).

To the extent Facebook is rising to this level of power and defacto becoming one of the largest media distribution channels, if they censor - and become editors - they should expect to find themselves eventually hit by similar restrictions, as they may be on the road to becoming a substantial challenge to democracy.

TheCoreh• 10 years ago

Why should nudity be disallowed in the first place, though?

The photo is clearly not sexual or pornographic. As for censoring it partially: Are we really totally fine with seeing someone burned by napalm, just not with seeing their genitals?

The photo is arguably one of the most famous pieces of photojournalism, and helped shape our civilization. I remember seeing it for the first time in my elementary school history book, even: it can't be that inappropriate.

I understand why they wouldn't want Facebook to degenerate into a porn (or borderline porn) filled website. I think they simply are relying too much on automated systems to remove content, and don't have a good appeal system in place.

userbinator• 10 years ago

"We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community. Our solutions won’t always be perfect, but we will continue to try to improve our policies and the ways in which we apply them."

Does anyone else find these sorts of vague, bland, verbose, and somewhat doublespeak-ish "non-answers" a bit tedious to read, and tiresome? This "whatever" tone seems to have taken over a lot of PR these days, and I've met people who actually speak like that. It's a lot of verbiage and feels more like they're saying what amounts to "we'll say we're trying, but we don't really care all that much about the edge cases".

andmarios• 10 years ago

A couple days ago there was an entry about how European startups fail to scale because they don't take time to understand how their audience differ in the countries they expand. :)

vidarh8• 10 years ago

That's a baffling sentiment to me, as to me one of the key advantages I've seen for European companies internationally is that most are forced to face cultural and legal differences from day one, while US companies often take a very long time to expand abroad exactly because they for a long time have the luxury of ignoring cultural differences, and very often end up with bizarre approaches when they're finally forced to acknowledge the rest of the world...

mickmock2• 10 years ago

People complaining because it's a famous award winning photograph but still gets treated like every other photograph with nude kids in it?

I can just imagine them saying "It's just art bruh"

vidarh8• 10 years ago

What do you mean "like every other photograph with nudge kids in it"? Because most countries do not have laws against photographs with nudge kids in it. Most countries have laws against child porn. Yes, there are difficulties discerning the difference sometimes. This is not one of those cases.

In the case of Facebooks specific censorship, the issue is also not that she was a child in the photo, but nudity in general.

mickmock2• 10 years ago

It's not against the law?????? OMG! Oh wait... did I say anything about it being against the law? Exactly. Facebook does not allow nudity. Get over it.

Zuckerberg blasted for censorship of Pulitzer prize-winning photo

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