Phuc Off: Zuckerberg and Facebook’s thought police erase Napalm Girl and you’re next
Facebook has a tricky relationship with censoring images. It recently censored a drawing of a human hand and banned Stephen Ellcock, who’d posted the image. But how do we stand of pictures of naked children?
Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of “abusing power” after Facebook deleted pictures of 9-year-old Kim Phúc, aka ‘Napalm Girl’, one subject in Terror of War, a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut that showed children fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war.
Norwegian Tom Egeland had posted the picture on Facebook as part of a wider debate on “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare”.
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Norway’s Aftenposten, newspaper has used his organ’s front page to accuse Zuckerberg of “abusing your power”, adding:
“I am worried that the world’s most important medium is limiting freedom instead of trying to extend it, and that this occasionally happens in an authoritarian way.”
Egeland’s post earned him a one-month suspension from Facebook. Aftenposten posted the news on its Facebook page, including the offending photo. It received the warning:
“Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed.”
So what?
Facebook is a website – a very large one, but, nonetheless a website. You can post the picture on your own website if you like.
What Facebook should mind is that it’s dull. It thinks a startling picture of the pain and horror of war is too strong for its delicate readers. It thinks you might get sexually aroused by the image. Facebook has a pretty low view of its customers.
And what goes for pictures goes for words, too. At a 2016 event in Berlin, Zuckenberg vowed to work closer with the German police and look out for victims. “Hate speech has no place on Facebook or in our community,” he said, declining to explain what hate speech is and who gets to decide what is and what is not offensive. He expanded on his view of “protected groups”, saying that Facebook will “now include hate speech against migrants as an important part of what we just now have no tolerance for… Until recently in Germany I don’t think we were doing a good enough job, and I think we will continue needing to do a better and better job.”
Protect migrants seeking better lives in countries where they can think and speak freely by censoring people in those countries from doing just that, banning the natives from doing the very things that make those places desirable to the oppressed. Got it?
That’s the viewpoint from the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook.
If you can be banned from Facebook for publishing a picture of a hand or a crying child, can you be banned for calling for a wall to be built between the USA and Mexico, saying ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, or stating that Nickelback fans are deluded?
Facebook is founded on human-to-human communication.
If you stymie that, the site loses its way. It becomes a safe space where only big corporations that play ball (and pay Facebook’s exorbitant fees to reach all of their own readers who ‘like’ their pages) show up on timelines. Then people will go elsewhere to talk freely and air an opinion.
Given the amount of time and effort we and many others have spent cultivating readers on Facebook – my own Flashbak page is soaring but not everyone who ‘liked’ it sees the thing – this is shaping up to be one of the biggest corporate pratfalls of all time.
UPDATE: Facebook will let this one go.
“Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed. It will take some time to adjust these systems but the photo should be available for sharing in the coming days. We are always looking to improve our policies to make sure they both promote free expression and keep our community safe.”
Protecting the community. Sheesh.
Posted: 9th, September 2016 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
