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Norway's Largest Newspaper Accuses Mark Zuckerberg of Abusing Power After Facebook Deletes 'Napalm Girl' Post (theguardian.com)
An anonymous shares a report on The Guardian:Norway's largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company's decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as "the world's most powerful editor." Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Aftenposten, accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly "abusing your power" over the social media site that has become a lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world, writing, "I am upset, disappointed -- well, in fact even afraid -- of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society. 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," he said. The controversy stems from Facebook's decision to delete a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured The Terror of War, a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut that showed children -- including the naked 9-year-old Kim Phuc -- running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Egeland's post discussed "seven photographs that changed the history of warfare" -- a group to which the "napalm girl" image certainly belongs.
Categorising one of the most important images of the 20th century with child pornography is a problem. A big one.
This has repercussions to the very roots of a free and informed society.
Welcome to the world. Our press has become ever more tightly concentrated over the past hundred years and highly censored during every war, including the world war we are in right now. Oh did you not notice we have troops fighting wars in at least 5 different countries right now? During the Bush years the press was all too eager to support going to war and then oppose the war, then hide the war for the last 7 years once it was supposedly over. We have a fickle press, but not a free one.
Sure the Internet was great for a while, but those looking to control society have learned how to manipulate it to a great extent. And now we are back to having very centralized control of the press.
This is very true! Zuckerberg had nothing to do with the removal of the photograph. It is some millennial, with a man-bun and a beard, looking at pictures and determining from some PDF Facebook policy manual whether or not a picture needs to be deleted. Said millennial probably didn't realize that this was one of the most historically significant pictures ever taken. He/She probably doesn't even know enough about history to be aware of said picture. It's not some fascist plot by overlord Zuckerberg to suppress freedom of speech. It's just a simple mistake made by someone who thinks they are following child pornography rules. God help us when the millennials are in charge of something more important than Facebook's photograph posting policy!
On the contrary; they are. Think of it this way: Facebook is essentially acting as a web host for its user's content. How is Facebook's censoring any more acceptable than if some entity like GoDaddy or Wordpress did it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz