Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

http://www.wsj.com/articles/norway-accuses-facebook-of-censorship-over-deleted-photo-of-napalm-girl-1473428032

by ljk • 10 years ago

148 150 10 years ago

nyreed• 10 years ago

Too little too late? They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country.

That must surely be a tipping point?

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country.

I'm not sure it should matter whether it's a Prime Minister or a 22 year old college dropout.

mikeash3• 10 years ago

Regardless of whether or not it should, it seems pretty clear that it does.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country.

They set the tone when they deleted one of the most iconic news photos in history; that it got reshared by the democratically elected leader of a country (and then deleted again) was just adding enormous visibility to the tone they'd already set.

forgottenpass2• 10 years ago

Too little too late?

You and I wish that was the case. This is a minor concession made by Facebook that they and their apologists be able to use for years to trumpet about how their content polices are oh-so reasonable, and that they're super duper flexible and thoughtful. That those very few rare cases where they overstep are reconsidered and rolled back.

If they fix all the high-publicity cases, then it's easy to sell the idea that they're always doing the right thing. Otherwise why aren't more people complaining?

throwanem4• 10 years ago

You're not wrong. But your analysis excludes one salient point: This only works if we permit it. We need not do so.

daveloyall2• 10 years ago

This article doesn't mention the Prime Minister of Norway's contribution to this story, but HN readers are probably aware of it from another post today.

fullshark• 10 years ago

A tipping point towards what exactly?

vidarh2• 10 years ago

Too little too late, but it will mean that more people who get censored will kick up a fuzz over it, hopefully, and force them to reconsider more widely in the future.

byron_fast• 10 years ago

At least now we know the minimum bar to get Facebook to temporarily pretend to change a policy: be the leader of a first-world nation.

legitster3• 10 years ago

Devil's advocate: I don't see why Facebook isn't allowed to choose what is or isn't displayed on their site. The only reason Facebook is a platform people choose to use is because of the editorial decisions they have been making. And the problem was that the policy was too consistent? That they were not making enough exceptions to the rule for important people?

mikeash3• 10 years ago

Of course they're allowed to choose. And we're allowed to choose to criticize them in public for those choices. And they're allowed to choose to change their actions based on that criticism. Everybody is acting on the basis of their freedoms.

legitster3• 10 years ago

I'm reading this as a non-statement. Like I'm saying that no one should be outraged about this, and you are saying there is no such thing as outrage, just people acting in their own interests. Fine, that's very true, but then that takes the steam out of all arguments everywhere.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

Devil's advocate: I don't see why Facebook isn't allowed to choose what is or isn't displayed on their site.

They are allowed to. If they weren't allowed to, this wouldn't have happened at all.

OTOH, everyone else is allowed to criticize their particular choices, even while recognizing that they have the right to make choices.

The only reason Facebook is a platform people choose to use is because of the editorial decisions they have been making.

I disagree that this is the only reason, but even if this was true that wouldn't be an argument against public commentary and criticism regarding Facebook's editorial decisions.

And the problem was that the policy was too consistent?

No, the problem that has been suggested is that the policy is too simplistic, not too consistent.

legitster3• 10 years ago

"We don't keep pictures of naked children on our site." That doesn't seem too simplistic. Especially since censorship for Facebook requires an international staff of thousands to go through every single photo looking for child pornography or gore. How do you train contractors in the Philippines the subtleties between a photo that has historic merit and one that is lewd?

The only reason FB is the "safe" place it is is because they have done an incredibly good and consistent job of getting this type of stuff done. And I don't see any way they run around policies like this without just giving special privileges to ignore the posts of more influential people.

betolink• 10 years ago

Can Facebook be held accountable under monopoly laws? They are too big and too influential for our own good.

daveloyall2• 10 years ago

Antitrust laws. (I believe that is what monopoly laws are called.)

I don't think that will work. We're gonna have to make new laws, the social media laws.

...Never thought I'd type that! :)

whamlastxmas• 10 years ago

This generally applies when they do something that prevents competition. If Facebook made it difficult or impossible for you to use other social media websites, then maybe.

npiazza832• 10 years ago

why?

swampthinker• 10 years ago

Says it right in the article. They made the wrong decision to censor a historically relevant photograph. So they backed down.

npiazza832• 10 years ago

Who made the decision within the company? That's way more important than the fact the decision was made. Do they have a new position we were previously unaware of that handles requests for heads of state? What if the request is for the opposite? Who censors things explicitly? Who handles media relations? When? Why? Over what threshold do they consider it to be an issue?

Why?

kinkdr2• 10 years ago

One thing that I don't understand is why all these people that complain about Facebook don't just switch to an open source, distributed Social Network platform.

It's not like anybody is forcing them to use FB or that there are no alternatives.

untog2• 10 years ago

Quite literally, network effects. There is no point using an open source, distributed social network if you have no friends on it.

In many ways you don't really have a choice about what social network you use, just whether you use one at all.

tbirdz2• 10 years ago

On the positive side, if you don't know anyone on the network, then it's a great opportunity to make some new friends!

pdkl95• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

It's hard to get your n(n − 1)/2 friends and family to also switch.

lutorm2• 10 years ago

One thing that I don't understand is why all these people that complain about Facebook don't just ... stop using it.

Just seems like a gigantic waste of time to me... ;-)

NotOscarWilde2• 10 years ago

Here are two examples:

* My group of friends and acquaintances who play badminton coordinate on Facebook; we do not work at the same place or have each other's phone numbers. People use the number of "Going" people to figure out whether there are still slots to play or not.

* The local university feminist organization is organized 100% through Facebook. We send one email a month or so to our mailing list, but if you want to participate (help out, for instance), you do this through the closed Facebook group.

It may be easy to leave Facebook and stay in contact with your closest friends; it's hard to replace larger social groups like those above.

vacri3• 10 years ago

One of the several things that bothers me about Twitter is that news agencies now use it as a source of react quotes. A private company showing the opinions of people unrelated to the event is now a 'news source'.

gwright7• 10 years ago

News agencies are generally private companies and often mix 'news' with punditry which often includes opinions of people unrelated to the event.

untog2• 10 years ago

I wonder, do these restrictions also apply to Instant Articles? Because as much as Facebook wants to deny being a media company, if it is providing (and censoring) a platform news organizations publish through it most definitely is one. And it's worth stopping to think about what that means when compared to the open web.

erickhill• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464883 Facebook to reinstate censored image of ‘napalm girl’

sctb• 10 years ago

Thanks, we merged the previous discussion with this one.

manachar• 10 years ago

An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites.

No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else".

This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Facebook be forced to allow porn as something that is protected by freedom of expression?

On the flip side, as more and more of meaningful speech occurs on these not-really-public forums of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, there exists quite a bit of unease on my part for these global companies to insist on narrowing expression on these platforms to that which they deem acceptable by whatever internal process they desire.

Facebook's study that showed they could manipulate people's feelings by altering the feed algorithm indicates this is an awful lot of power handed to a company focused on making profits and staying on the good side of governmental organizations.

YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.

This would likely be okay if there were real public space on the web, but it currently operates more as a series of visits to other people's private property. The release valve is a persons ability to create their own corner of the internet, but even this must leap through various ISP and web host providers terms of service. Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere?

Cases like this photo will only become more apparent as time goes on. I'm not sure how society will negotiate these ideas, but at present, the commercial interests are leading the conversation in their favor.

ucaetano2• 10 years ago

"An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites."

This photo was taken by a photographer employed by a private company, then published by a private company, awarded a prize by a private organization.

Not much has changed.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 10 years ago

The alternative is something like socialism or communism. No thanks.

PhasmaFelis2• 10 years ago

There was a while when news services at least paid lip service to the idea that they told people what they needed to know, not just what they wanted to hear. Obviously it wasn't perfect, but a lot of journalists took it very seriously.

Facebook just fired the last of its on-staff journalists.

larsiusprime• 10 years ago

relevant: http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2014/04/26/free-speech-and-the...

Joeboy• 10 years ago

The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.

eva19842• 10 years ago

Prior to internet, speeches are controlled by newspapers and televisions. They won't even publish your speech if they don't like it. In that sense, Internet is still a huge step forward.

bobcostas55• 10 years ago

The difference is network effects. There are tons and tons of newspapers (over 1000 in the US alone), and one can plausibly start their own. There's a tiny number of social networks and it's extremely difficult to break into that market.

Low barriers + large numbers is at least a nudge in the direction of intellectual diversity.

idrios4• 10 years ago

I agree with you. To continue your internet-as-a-physical-place analogue, Facebook is basically a mall where you are encouraged to hang out and intermittently enticed to buy things.

-No porn on Facebook is the equivalent to no nudity allowed at the mall.

-Banning users is the equivalent of kicking a person out of the mall.

-Censoring messages is the equivalent of... uh.. gagging a person just before they can say something you didn't want them to say.

-Direct messaging people or groups is the equivalent of talking to your friends, while an anonymous person videotapes and listens without really letting you know they're doing that.

-Posting a status is the equivalent of shouting what you're feeling or thinking to nobody in particular

-Facebook curating newsfeeds is the equivalent of putting you in a room and showing videos of the things your friends are shouting, intermittently throwing in advertisements, and just kind of letting you believe that what you're seeing is real and unadulterated.

Point is, if you look at Facebook like a physical establishment, it's a pretty weird place.

But as long as people continue to recognize that censorship and surveillance are not cool, they will continue to complain to the groups who engage in it, and constantly be on the lookout for better alternatives.

I personally recommend Snapchat for un-surveilled interaction with friends, Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary, and LinkedIn to stay connected with people. And I'm glad that there are reasonable alternatives to all of these

serge2k• 10 years ago

Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary

Except not really. Rules and moderation are censorship.

Why would you not recommend whatsapp or another encrypted system?

ciupicri• 10 years ago

Both Snapchat and Whatsapp are a joke when it comes to privacy because the client software is closed source.

adiM2• 10 years ago

Wait, how is LinkedIn any better than Facebook?

gjolund• 10 years ago

It makes me sad that I will be explaining to future generations that the web was once the last bastion of freedom.

skybrian• 10 years ago

Why are we having this conversation here rather than on Reddit or Twitter? For me it's because I prefer a moderated forum. We don't have pictures at all here (though you can link to them) which makes some issues non-problems.

Many people are more interested in avoiding spam and abuse than they are in seeing something outrageous. As long as you have forum-shopping the more highly moderated places have an advantage, at least some of the time.

Facebook is in the moderation business. They're going to screw up sometimes but they're not going to stop moderating. On the other side you often have people saying they're not doing enough about abuse.

baq• 10 years ago

Side note: Reddit has lots of heavily moderated subs of excellent quality. HN is perhaps a bit less focused than them. I don't see why r/hackernews couldn't be a thing.

hkmurakami• 10 years ago

As Washington DC moves its publishing to Medium, I wonder what ramifications we will face in the future.

scrollaway• 10 years ago

YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.

Not at all recently. But youtube's policies and the community's reactions to them are very much a case of "First they came for the x". Happens very regularly, and only the affected ones speak up, which is just not enough when we're talking about a web giant like google/youtube.

force_reboot• 10 years ago

you've just expressed a great counterpoint to https://xkcd.com/1357/.

Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.

JoshTriplett2• 10 years ago

Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere?

Yes, absolutely. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to an audience.

posterboy2• 10 years ago

No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech

They are liable to offer the service in good faith. If their service to the user is communication, then I don't see how that promises any less than free speech. Publication of pornography to minors is an offense, so it's not covered by free speech to begin with. The picture in question is not pornography.

pmontra• 10 years ago

Go back 30 years. TV and newspapers were (and are) private companies too. We had free speech when speaking with friends or at a political meeting, and sending mail.

Now we're doing more of that kind of communication inside social networks. They can't censor preemptively so they censor after we publish. But it's not different than wanting to write to friends using a newspaper as intermediary. The reason we were not doing that was the extreme inconvenience of the method but censorship would have been the same.

What we're doing now is forcing free speech protection on some companies that became a communication medium almost indistinguishable from free air. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.

mirimir• 10 years ago

Well, outside of California and New Jersey, the First Amendment’s strong protection for free expression — particularly speech involving public issues — likely won’t apply in your local mall if it’s privately owned.

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-...

zouhair• 10 years ago

I think we need laws that when a website has a certain number of users it should be considered a public space and not private one anymore.

jimmywanger• 10 years ago

Well, you can't really have it both ways.

Both Twitter and Facebook were trumpeting their dedication to freedom of speech and liberty during Arab Spring.

If they had just said, "Look we have all these shareholders we have to appease with money, and right now this is the best way to make more money" I would have no problem with that.

Don't pretend to be anti-censorship and then turn around and censor things.

Alex3917• 10 years ago

In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.

Translation: if you document any of the numerous real human rights atrocities that are happening today then expect to get banned. If anything, the fact that this photo is already 'historic' and 'iconic' means that it's less important than what's being captured today.

nerfhammer• 10 years ago

Algorithms can't tell the difference between porn/gore and historically significant graphic images

muglug• 10 years ago

They can if you train them on the right data – a corpus of historically significant photos would be relatively small.

panic2• 10 years ago

Yes, which is why algorithms aren't an adequate solution to the problem of screening Facebook posts.

jMyles2• 10 years ago

If an algorithm mistakes this image for porn, it's pretty damn broken anyway.

mtgx3• 10 years ago

Then Facebook should stop pretending its AI is anything but worthless.

vacri3• 10 years ago

This photo and ones like it are a large part of why people were saying "No, US, please don't go and invade Iraq on a whim". Just because the event has passed does not mean that the information is relatively meaningless.

If more people had've paid attention to this photo and its ilk, perhaps the US wouldn't have destroyed Iraq, and ISIS wouldn't be doing those atrocities of which you speak.

inputcoffee• 10 years ago

Would we say:

1. The process worked. Facebook looked it over, reasoned about it, and changed their minds. Kudos to them for admitting a mistake.

2. It took a media uproar to make a change like this. The process is broken. There has to be a better way to make these changes.

3. There was no right objective answer in the first place, so the process is inherently political.

I am leaning towards #3. Want to know what the HN community thinks.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

Whether one believes #3 is orthogonal to whether one believes #1 or #2 (or perhaps some other alternative to those two), they are beliefs about different attributes of the affair.

TazeTSchnitzel• 10 years ago

4. Facebook should not have the marketshare or power it does, and should not censor criticism of itself.

d33• 10 years ago

#2 - The process is broken. I'd naively suggest decentralization as a solution (yeah, I know it worked great for Diaspora..).

Consider this: what if it was the only copy of this picture? What about the smaller publishers that can't easily build media uproar? Could we ever end up with this kind of "mistakes" happening automatically thanks to AI algorithms?

aetherson• 10 years ago

When "the process" that "worked" involved a head of state of a top 30 GDP country getting their post in support deleted before ending up coming up in your favor, then you definitely do not have any evidence that there is a real process that can work.

beachy• 10 years ago

Yeah, And in this case, it took a head of state to get one of the most instantly recognisable war photos of all time past the Facebook censors.

That photo was said by some to have been instrumental in bringing home to Americans the brutal effect of the war. It may have actually contributed to shortening the war.

Now imagine if the Vietnam war was underway right now, and that photo was taken 24 hours ago.

Would it be seen on Facebook? No way.

Their system is utterly broken.

panic2• 10 years ago

"Objective" and "political" are not opposites. Whether I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream is both completely subjective and completely apolitical, and I'm sure there are plenty of politics involved in math and physics research (the most "objective" things I can think of).

mtgx3• 10 years ago

#2 The process is definitely broken. If Facebook's AI isn't smart enough to know what it's banning, then it shouldn't be doing censorship.

mc32• 10 years ago

Why can't FB do like Flickr and deploy a system where people self classify their content and then subscribers can set whether they want all content or safe content as well as provide the "take me back to the kittens" if an image offends...

jMyles2• 10 years ago

I'm not a facebook user, so I've never run head-long into this policy, but why doesn't facebook allow photos of nude children?

It seems awkward and creepy to consider all photos of nude children to be pornographic.

The vast, overwhelming majority (surely more than 99.9%, maybe more than two nines) of photos of nude children have no plausible sexual tone whatsoever.

And, similarly, I presume that many images that are indeed pornographic depict children who are clothed.

What does one have to do with the other?

For adults, I kinda understand: sex is one of the main reasons adults take their clothes off. But kids, especially young kids, run around naked all the time!

Does facebook not permit pictures of birth?

wyager2• 10 years ago

Weird American nudity taboos. They don't make a lot of sense.

pjscott• 10 years ago

It's all about what someone could plausibly imagine someone else finding arousing. Never mind intent, and never mind content; is there someone, hypothetical or real, who could get off on it? Can pedophiles enjoy it?

This policy is not about protecting anyone. It's about keeping up appearances. The same can be said about most policies.

wyager2• 10 years ago

Well they'd better start banning pictures of tile patterns! http://imgur.com/gallery/DowgNSg

awqrre• 10 years ago

They backed down because they figured out who they were censoring?

aikah• 10 years ago

Good, are we done with fake outrage ?

beyti• 10 years ago

Am I the only one concerned here about the posts with links requiring to sign up just to read?

for people like me, here a link not requiring a signup to read: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-...

intrasight• 10 years ago

Inquiring minds want to know - was it a stupid algorithm or a stupid person at Facebook that deleted those posts.

Xorlev• 10 years ago

A flood of people flagging the picture, likely.

rpeden• 10 years ago

It wouldn't even need to be a stupid person. Just a person who probably won't get in trouble for erring on the side of caution, but could face serious consequences for failing to enforce Facebook's policies.

That's usually a decent approach, and in most cases it doesn't cause an uproar. In the few cases where it does, the hot potato gets tossed up the chain of command until someone reverses the decision.

Or, as others have mentioned, the deletion was triggered automatically when the image was flagged by too many people. I sympathize with the deletion algorithm here. If I slave over a hot CPU all day just trying to do my job, the last thing I want to do is get sent to /dev/null because I failed to delete an image that really was inappropriate.

tn13• 10 years ago

It would have made much more sense to say "no nude children" no matter what and consistently apply it. Naplam girl's photo could have been blurred a little and still be shown to convey the exact same message.

This sort of exception based polciies would lead facebook into same trouble as the way they were censoring conservative news.

e12e2• 10 years ago

What age are children, and is other nudity allowed? Pictures of states like David? It's not dimple to find a moral common ground for the entire world (or even some arbitrary selection of countries that are deemed to have "valid" morals).

posterboy2• 10 years ago

previous discussion of the aftenposten editor's response, poster of the photo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004

mtgx3• 10 years ago

Oh...so Facebook "backs down" after another one of their censorship cases blows up on the Internet.

But how many thousands of similar cases don't find the same outrage online, but are still just as dangerous? We don't hear about those. That's the problem with censorship - most of the time you don't even know what you were supposed to be able to see, by the time it's censored.

mark_l_watson• 10 years ago

I agree with the comments that having public forums controlled by single companies like Facebook and Reddit can be problematic if they start censoring what people are allowed to post.

What I do, and what I encourage family and friends to do, is to have your own blog and post substantial writings on your blog and use social media posts to reference your blog. I still use social media for posting vacation pictures, commenting on other people's posts, and links to interesting stuff to read on the web.

I think this is a good compromise.

AzzieElbab• 10 years ago

Can't we all agree that tech notwithstanding Facebook is just dumb in every way possible.

Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

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