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."
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.)
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.
In case anyone wonders what happened to her, Phan Th Kim Phúc (the girl in the photo) survived the napalm attack, albeit with injuries. She is now a Canadian citizen, living in Ajax, Ontario with her husband and two children. In 2015 she began getting laser treatments for her burn scars in Miami.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Her name is Kim Phuc and she now lives in Canada. She was fleeing a napalm strike by the South Vietnamese Air Force.
How the Vietnam War's 'Napalm Girl' Is Finally Getting Her Scars Treated – 43 Years Later
The girl in the picture: Kim Phuc's journey from war to forgiveness
'Napalm Girl': An Iconic Image Of War Turns 40
The Kim Foundation International
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Those that are most critical of Facey bookey for censoring would also criticize for supporting pedophilia if they had gone in the other direction. Anyone can criticize and there is nothing facey bookey can do to not incur the wrath or correct thinking people on the webs.
On another note, that the offending picture could never have been taken of the Iraq / Afganistanian wars. Everyone would self censor. What can we learn from this? We can learn that everyone alive in 1970 was a blatant pedophile. Today in more enlightened times we do not put up with this crap. We do however take kids away from their parents for daring to let them walk to school alone.
It is truly a brave new world we live in. It is OK, though because Hillary Clinton / Trump is going to make it all right. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.
.
If there is a problem, it is those people who mistake Facebook for journalism or integrity.
Just wait until someone posts the original Blind Faith album cover.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
John_Chalisque
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.
I don't like FB but I can't fault them for this; content filtering is hard and ad-supported services can't afford to spend much per time or money per user. FB's terrible 'censors' are probably a bunch of overworked and underpaid college students, a few of whom might even know where the Vietnam War was fought. Mistakes will be made.
In this case, mistakes were made, the users protested, FB restored the images, the end.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Otherwise plus plus.
Am I the only person here who is offended by calling this poor person "Napalm Girl"? I feel it really diminishing her and what happened to her. While others here pointed out her name, I will not, as I feel the victim to the event deserves some anonymity, given her age when it happened and the horrific event itself. Please give her the dignity she deserves. And, please do not use my alias as a pun against her. I have been using it for years, only to indicate certain habits I did have (and thusly richly deserve the alias) during the 60's and 70's (yes, I saw the photo when it was first published). So please, stop calling her this atrocious name.
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
Actually, no. Kim Phuk was bombed by South-Vietnamese bombers; that hardship was inflicted on Vietnamese by Vietnamese.
The South Vietnamese were the clients of the US. The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do I really need to go here, or are you just being willfully silly?
In the off chance that you are serious:
We choose not to give complicit support for actions that cause greivious harm to children. An alarming amount of child nudity in photography is for the purpose of purile "entertainment" of adults at the expense of the children imaged, often involving physical and sexual abuse of these children. We call this kind of image "child pornography", and rightly desire not to encourage it, and instead to actively discourage it.
The decision to remove all images of nude children is one of pure convenience in the face of objections about child porn being " art.". (Real porn featuring children being declared art to resist its removal, diluting actual art.) When you don't display the image at all, authoritarian style that problem just goes away.
Instead of being sensible, and asking a few reasonable questions about the image under scrutiny, like:
Did the photographer harm, or promote the harm of, the child pictured?
Is this image of a decidedly sexual nature, or intended to cause sexual excitation?
Will the circulation of this image likely result in the harm of additional children?
Etc--
You instead opt to be lazy, and just forbid all images.
There are consequences to taking the quick, easy, and lazy route. You might consider reading the philosophical treatise by Baudrillard concerning this matter. He proposes that human abstractions for ideas supplant the original concepts, and that this process continues, resulting in a final form that lacks all resemblance of the original, even denying the very concept of an original. (Progression of simulacra). By banning all pictures of naked children in order to combat the proliferation of child porn, you ultimately redefine what child porn is, and that process continues until the concept of child porn that comes to be has no resemblance whatsoever to the original one through which the practice was instituted in the first place. Eg, now "child porn" is any picture of a child in any state of undress, regardless of content or context. The emphasis is no longer to prevent the harm of children, the emphasis is the censorship itself, and the taboo of violating the censorship.
In the case of this image of Kim phuc, the girl was harmed: she was just moments earlier, literally on fire that cannot be easily extinguished (by design!), and ripped her own burning clothes off to save herself, while running from the burning remains of her home village-- destroyed for its strategic location in combating the Viet Kong.
Is the image likely to cause harm to other children?
No. This image was taken to draw attention to the harm being done, to prevent further harm. It is 180degrees off from being supportive of child harm.
Is the image of a sexual nature?
No. The image is of a terrified girl desperate to save herself as her world literally burns around her. There is no context for sex in this image at all.
Is this image intended to cause sexual excitation?
No. The intent of the image is to cause disgust and horror.
Very easy to determine that this is not child porn, when you don't become intellectually lazy and allow the basic concepts underpinning the basis of why we censor sexually explicit images of children to become mutated abstractions with no basis in reality.
Did you just assume Hatshepsut's genotype?
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm sure it will be fine after you control all the news: https://www.yahoo.com/news/fac...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Well, mainly because there are no common-sense policies such as "no child nudity".
When everything is binary, nothing has nuance. That way lies intolerance, authoritarianism and death. There's no common fucking sense to that.
Bingo.
"No child nudity" is the authoritarians "easy" solution, that results in a morbid distortion that ultimately lacks the reasoning for the prohibition in the first place.
Silly, silly anonymous coward, believing that the political correctness madness does not originate in the liberal left, along with silly ideas about how being rude is always wrong, and nobody should get their feelings hurt ever.
The sad truth is that both sides really just love hearing themselves talk, and hate hearing what the other is saying, to the point that both sides really are totally down with censorship and echochambers.
The intent of the image is to cause disgust and horror.
Sorry, I disagree. The intent of Nick Ut is known probably only to him but I'd guess he wasn't there to cause disgust and horror, he was there to document.
The entire power of the image is that it hasn't been manipulated, isn't artificially portrayed to cause emotion; it shows reality, and any emotional reaction is because of that reality, not the image of it.
This is one reason war photography is amongst the most honest form of art, let alone photography. Sure, you get the posed images, the action replays, the entirely faked activities.. but the best photographs, the ones that hurt, the ones that reach deep inside you.. they're very very real.
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
The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
The truth is that the killings and suffering in Vietnam increased tenfold after the Americans were gone and the civilians were left to face the Communists.
It's okay to suck Communist dick, I just hope you do that for money (as opposed to being so dumb to do it for free).
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
"Getting it right" depends on what they're trying to get right. TheIntercept.com tells us "Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored" and Glenn Greenwald told us about these problems before as did Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen before Greenwald (the latter two rightly calling Facebook "a monstrous surveillance engine" and the like). As Moglen points out in every one of his speeches in the past few years (if not longer) that "Stallman was right". But back to your point about how Facebook should stop trying to "get it right" as Facebook's rep says: These are precisely the problems any censor faces when trying to figure out the details of what should be censored; the implicit assumption being that censorship is right & proper to do, and is merely a matter of haggling over price (be it money or favors with the powerful) as the old joke goes.
Digital Citizen
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. Yes there were South Vietnamese forces sent to prison for helping the Americans. There's a guy who teaches Math at UIC who is one of them and he's told me the story.
According to the Red Cross, the transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of Vietnam was less violent on those collaborators than the liberation of France in WWII.
So no, the killings and suffering in Vietnam did not increase tenfold after the Americans were gone. In fact they lessened a great deal. Now all we have to do is get rid of the 80,000,000 unexploded cluster bombs from the 250,000,000 that the Americans dropped on Laos between '64 and '73, but I suppose you're going to tell me that Laos got more violent after the Americans left, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
common-sense policies such as "no child nudity"
As others have said, there is nothing common-sensical about that. If someone sees something sexual in an image of a naked child, that someone is the problem, not the image.
Liberty is not being free of government you fuckwit - liberty is being having a say in how and works and effectively being a part of it. All the "democracy is two wolves and a sheep choosing dinner" manipulative pricks are pretending that the "sheep" who want a fair system for all come in massive flocks and the wolves are very rare.
:)
Democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others
Correction:
Pretending that the "sheep" who want a fair system for all don't come in massive flocks and pretending that the wolves are not as rare as they are.
Facebook hardly ever gets it right. Whatever it does. Facebook can not meaningfully be associated with "right" within any moral framework worthy of that name.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
What in the world was difficult about this? A war photo of a little girl whose clothing had been burned off by Napalm. What exactly was the difficult decision? There was zero reason to censor this photo. Good Lord these people can be such idiots!
If two wolves and a sheep vote for dinner, game theory tells us that one of the wolves is going to be dinner and it's going to be the sheep's call which one. If you're a sheep, you obviously want to stay alive, so won't vote to be eaten. If you're a wolf, you want to end up in a situation tomorrow where there's one wolf and a sheep, not two wolves. Both wolves have an incentive to vote for the other wolf, the sheep gets to pick whichever wolf grants it the most concessions in exchange for its vote. As analogies go, it's a pretty poor one for making the point that its proponents think that they're making.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thanks, I'll have to remember that the next time someone inflicts the silly quote on me.
The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
Are you forgetting to mention the Chinese imperialism for a reason?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Or the cover from Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.
If they would have kept their strong policy here, there would be a general discussion about the policy. So they admit a small failure, allow the image and life goes on. Nobody needs to discuss the policies any further, because the image is there, isn't it?
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. .
Seriously - ~2 million people fled the country by any means possible (a staggering percentage of whom died in the effort, and the majority of the survivors telling tales of being shot at and losing family to the NVA on their way out).
Pretty sure they weren't leaving a peaceful utopia, sport.
So, do you have better documentation for your assertions than 'my math prof told me'?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'm also kind of curious as to how much 'US imperialism' figured into Lenin and Stalin's little string of atrocities...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Can you give examples of Lenin and Stalin committing atrocities in Vietnam?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Unfortunately, there are people who are sexually turned on by children, and some of them are evil. This led to child pornography being a hot issue, and it unfortunately included child nudity as part of the reaction. The picture is legal under the CP laws I've looked at, but different places have different CP definitions, and they aren't all intelligent.
The safest thing for something like Facebook to do is to disallow child nudity under any circumstances. Sad but true.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wow! Is this over-hyped in the media.
Facebook, please remove all child nudity automatically. That is fine. If someone wants an exception, please let them submit that exception manually.
That is what happened.
This is not a problem at all.
And also, facebook is saying this historic photo would never be seen if it was shot and posted today. We live in a censored time, where history will simply disappear because some aspect of the memory of it offends someone.