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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."
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 Investigative journalism has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter posts.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."