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

Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[wierd_w]

Seriously-- You got caught red handed being censorship loving fuckwits who refuse to accept community feedback on policy decisions, naturally, you got your asses handed to you over it, and now you want to cuddle back into good graces so you can once again start dishing out your authoritarian horseshit once this blows over.

Fuck you.

(and for the people with the usual "Their service, their rules!" attitudes, fuck you idiots too. Facebook has maneuvered itself as a major gatekeeper between the press and their readers. That is what caused this whole censorship issue to explode like this in the first place. Once you start acting like a monopoly, or at least the major stake holder for a necessary position for society, you stop being allowed to have authoritarian control, and need to be more civically minded.)

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[The-Ixian]

Don't use FB... problems solved.

FB is far from a monopoly and they are not a charity. They are a for-profit company and they can run their company any way that they see fit. If you don't like it, vote with your feet and uninstall the app, delete your account and walk away. If enough people do this, then FB will not have the power it has now. FB is only as powerful as your make it.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[The-Ixian]

True, but in this case, it was manually removed by a FB drone after being flagged by another user as inappropriate.

Which is fine. The drone, just like the algorithm, is just doing their pre-programmed job.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[swb]

These days when I go down to the public square to stand on my soap box and make my voice heard, the public square is empty.

The public, which used to mostly be reachable via the public sphere, has all moved into spaces which are privately owned and publicly accessible for commerce, but not publicly accessible for free speech.

This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[jratcliffe]

Except that it also has to be feasible. We're talking about tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pictures a day. Any screening process (and there has to be a screening process) is going to occasionally have a false positive.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[Anonymous Coward]

(and for the people with the usual "Their service, their rules!" attitudes, fuck you idiots too. Facebook has maneuvered itself as a major gatekeeper between the press and their readers. That is what caused this whole censorship issue to explode like this in the first place.

There's a bigger problem. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Imgur, Github, all of the big names have formed a consortium where they all have the same content rules and are censoring the same things with an obvious political agenda. Most of the popular internet is owned centrally by one entity that intends to deny you access to information they don't want you to see. The censorship of Gamergate exposed the network two years ago and it has gotten more powerful since then.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[Kjella]

I think it's a lot simpler than that they are "censorship loving fuckwits", they're a private company trying to make money. You don't make money if you need an f...ing lawyer to check for rules and exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions and any applicable precedents as to whether or not a particular post is permitted. It used to be as simple as no nudity, not because there's anything wrong with tits and ass but that's not what it's about. Then they started having issues because people posted about breastfeeding and breast cancer and non-sexual reasons (well technically nudity shouldn't be sexual either but that's an even blurrier line) and so they had to start making exceptions.

And now for the record, you can find a naked 9yo on Facebook. What are now the conditions for how "iconic" a photo you must take before another exception will be made? Does it have to become iconic outside of Facebook even though in your opinion it is equally newsworthy? And it's not just their moderators who has to understand the complexity, you also want the users to understand the rules too and then they'd better be simple. Every time you bend the rules you're making it more and more complicated. It's how the real world is, but Facebook doesn't want to deal with every unique set of circumstances.

It's like the US constitution, you start with "freedom of speech" but then it turns out threats, slander, libel, fraud, perjury, shouting fire in a crowded theater or just playing music loudly at 3AM in the morning actually has to curb the edges with exceptions. And then you end up with a ton of legalese and not a one-page flyer with your bill of rights. It's really as simple as that Facebook doesn't need a rule that says no child nudity except if it's an iconic war photo of a naked girl running from a napalm attack. Because this is going to be one of a thousand exceptions at least some will argue they should do.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[wierd_w]

There is a problem with your argument:

The censorship did not stop at just the image. A public open letter to Facebook about this issue by a freaking prime minister was deleted.

Censorship. The real deal.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[Calydor]

You say you knew about the picture for decades before Facebook existed. That's great. That's how we learned about things BACK THEN.

The world has changed. You may not like it, I certainly don't like it, but when a sizable portion of the population only really visits Facebook and relies on Facebook for news, events, all that sort of stuff, ANY kind of censorship is getting dangerously close to revisionism.

There is not much difference between the main source of information, be it BREAKING NEWS! or cat videos, saying "There was no naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack" or saying "There was no protesting student run over by a tank on Tiananmen Square".

Be very careful what you allow.

Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook.

[wierd_w]

In which case, the appropriate action for Facebook to take is to have a human review the image once the poster disputes the takedown, and to act sensibly, rationally, and in a Kong authoritarian manner.

You know, NOT telling the journalist that the image is infringing without any room to contest. NOT taking down not only the journalist's open letter about the improper takedown, and NOT deleting the PRIME MINISTER'S post about it, while pretending that doing those things is all hunky dory.

You know, NOT the way Facebook chose to handle this, and now is trying hard to soon its way out of being caught red handed doing, and publicly shamed for.

Easy solution for you Facebook

[JoeyRox]

Stop trying to "get it right". You're not the arbiter of art or journalism. Just stick to what you do best - monetizing people's privacy.

Why is this even an issue?

[QuietLagoon]

Facebook is a private website dedicated to monetizing the information they have collected from the members of that private site. Facebook can do whatever they please on their private website.

.
If there is a problem, it is those people who mistake Facebook for journalism or integrity.

Re:Why is this even an issue?

[spacepimp]

Once Facebook took the plunge into editing/publishing and curating the news, everything you just said went out the window.

It's how I would have done it

[clovis]

What happened at Facebook was a mistake, but I would have made the same mistake.

If I owned Facebook, I would have a censorship policy. No naked children would be near the top of the list. It might even be the only thing on it.
I'm certain that most of the photos of naked children in existence are perfectly innocent. I have some of my kids and my parents have some of me.

But I don't want to host child porn, child rape, or anything like that. It's a plain and simple fact that there are people who abuse children in horrible ways, and if I didn't censor that kind of thing it would be all over the place. I don't give a shit if the law says it's OK for me to host it; I don't want to be part of it.
And you know what else? I don't want to have to examine photos of naked children to try to guess what's going on.
So. No naked children.

So all my minions would know this and censor publication of the Kim Phuc photo because they want to keep their jobs and perhaps because they agree with me.

And then the world would come down on me over the Kim Phuc photo, pointing out that I'm being a dumbass and this is so very clearly and important and historical photo, and I'd relent because in this case they're right and I'm wrong. But no way would I roll over for just anyone out there - it would have to take a lot of pressure for a specific case.

Re:So Facey bookey profits from Child Portography

[tnk1]

I actually doubt many people would have criticized that particular photo being left in. It's had rather wide exposure over the decades.

Or rather, they wouldn't have criticized only Facebook about it. It's been all over the media.

With all that in mind, I don't have a problem with their algorithm catching it, it's the picture of a naked minor who is definitely not enjoying herself at the time. Sounds like the filter found exactly what it was supposed to find. I think the people who were offended by it being filtered out are hyperventilating. Yes, it was a mistake, but only because that picture has historical relevance. Managing by exception is an appropriate way to deal with such things as long as they get around to putting it back and adding it as an exception for the future.

Re: Haha

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with child nudity or photos of it. We have a society that over reacted to a very small minority of abusers - thanks to an incompetent media like ABC - and disturbed folks who consume it.

The napalm girl showed in stark imagery the horrors of the Vietnam Nam war and the hardships the USA was inflicting on the Vietnamese people over ideology.

We don't see that now. Notice how sanitized the coverage is of the wars in Irag and Afganistan? Notice how they never seem to end?

We treat war like a football game now and have no clue the horrors we are inflicting and the permanent ill will we have created.

Re:So Facey bookey profits from Child Portography

[ClickOnThis]

it's the picture of a naked minor who is definitely not enjoying herself at the time.

It does not sexualize or exploit her. It depicts her, along with other wounded, terrified children, fleeing a napalm attack. A real napalm attack. IMHO, that means it is not child pornography. It is history.