Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On 'Napalm Girl' Photo: 'We Don't Always Get it Right' (theguardian.com)

Facebook will learn from a mistake it made by deleting a historic Vietnam war photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, said Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer. The photograph was removed from several accounts on Friday, including that of the Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, on the grounds that it violated Facebook's restrictions on nudity. It was reinstated after Solberg accused Facebook of censorship and of editing history, The Guardian reports. From the article:"These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right," Sandberg wrote in a letter to the prime minister, obtained by Reuters on Monday under Norway's freedom of information rules. "Even with clear standards, screening millions of posts on a case-by-case basis every week is challenging," Sandberg wrote. "Nonetheless, we intend to do better. We are committed to listening to our community and evolving. Thank you for helping us get this right," she wrote. She said the letter was a sign of "how seriously we take this matter and how we are handling it."

Comments

Tagging based solution

[John Allsup]

There needs to be acceptable nudity policies. These should require users who upload photos with nudity to tag them as such, including whether sexual or non-sexual (the napalm girl is clearly non-sexual), and even pornographic (if there is a service that allows pornographic images). The rule then is that the uploader must tag certain tags if appropriate (e.g. non-sexual nudity), and so on. Then users have users settings on whether to block such tags, and if they see untagged images which should have been tagged, and would have been blocked given their settings, then there is the 'inappropriate image' system. When it comes to sexual nudity stuff, if present at all, there should be checks on users. Then AI can flag possible non-tagged images. This really ought to be well within what Facebook can do. In addition, with sensitive stuff (like the revenge porn stuff), there should be terms and conditions where blatant stuff like that european lawsuit is about can lead to details of uploaders being sent either to police or the victim's lawyers.

The problem is to try too hard to have an idiot-proof one-size-fits-all acceptable image policy.