Slashdot Mirror
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."
Don't use FB... problems solved.
FB is far from a monopoly and they are not a charity.
FB has just shy on 24% of the entire Earth's human population connected to it. Do you want revisit your idea that that they are not a gatekeeper in social media?
For comparison, twitter only has accounts for about 4.3% of the Earths population.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Until recently as in the last few years I'd have agreed with you. The problem is there is an active migration movement driving people to New Hampshire for the purpose of pursuing liberty in our life time. There is no where in New Hampshire you can move to that you won't find lots of liberty-minded people who don't like the idea of government let alone big government or corporate monopolies such as Facebook. And nowhere that you won't find people who have migrated within the past few years for the purpose of pursuing liberty.
Even while people are utilizing facebook to some degree as an activist tool we're diversifying and decentralizing communications and getting out there in the real world. Activists are utilizing two-way radios, Telegram, some sort of chat thing called Porcchat, and even working to get away from the US dollar. In Keene, New Hampshire we have more BitCoin friendly businesses than anywhere else in the world and this is a town of a mere 30,000 people (including a smallish university population).
In Keene there are lots of opportunities to get out in the real world to meet people. We have multiple meetups a week. I'm going to one in 45 minutes: Taco Tuesdays. On Sunday's there is Social Sunday. There are also BitCoin meetups monthly as well. We're out and about in the real world. Not just attached to the computer. This is *JUST* Keene too. You'll find similar things going on in towns and cities across New Hampshire. Come, join us, at least if you want zero government or something close to it. We'd rather end taxation, public education, and police, and other burdensome and unnecessary programs that result in government theft of its people. We're not cold and we're not against charity. That would be a miss characterization. We just want it to actually be charity and not theft. It's not about money though. It's about the idea that you should not utilize violence to achieve political gain and taxes, public education, and similar are exactly this. Just as is the outlawing of drugs or restricting what people can buy or sell. You can have non-profit organizations keeping an eye on safety issues without government. We don't need a government to shut down unlicensed restaurants for people to make an educated decision not to eat at restaurants which have demonstrated themselves to be harmful.
www.freekeene.com www.freestateproject.org www.freetalklive.com
This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.
This is the disturbing natural of reality -- or perhaps SURreality? -- these days.
I remember suffering through reading Jean Baudrillard's musings about "simulacra" decades ago, when he famously published a set of essays including "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". Of course, Baudrillard understood that the war DID take place, but he argued that the media portrayals and 24-hour news cycle that emerged had created an almost separate reality.
Long before "The Matrix," Baudrillard talked about constructed reality and its ability to deceive and to woo humanity into complacency. But of course he is a horrendous writer and has rightly been ridiculed for willfully obscure nonsense, and at the time I dismissed what little sense I found as po-mo BS.
Alas, now it feels it has all come to pass, and I think of good ole Baudrillard with each year's new trends into the depths of the simulacrum. Encyclopedias and reference works have ceded their authority to wikiality and truthiness, a la Stephen Colbert. Investigative journalism has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter posts. Most people live within the simulacrum, rarely bothering to try to dig deeper and see whether all of this mediated experience actually corresponds to the real world.
And now we've delegated the authority once possessed by CNN and such to the mob of folks on Facebook. In some cases, this has undoubtedly been a good thing -- bringing a fresh democratic voice to things the "old" media would have never bothered with. But it's also a huge problem, since basic quality vetting, fact-checking, etc. are rarely done by the mob before they retweet, like, and repost.
But that's the "reality" we live in now. Rather depressing. It would not surprise me one bit if this led to a new "dark age" as facts become less important than "likes."