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
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 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.
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.
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Did you just assume Hatshepsut's genotype?
Ezekiel 23:20
Once Facebook took the plunge into editing/publishing and curating the news, everything you just said went out the window.
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.
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.
While I agree (and probably most reasonable people would), the fact is that naked pictures of minors above the age of 2 and under the age of 18 are basically considered "suspicious" in almost every case. A few internet searches will quickly show a multitude of stories from the past decade where innocent people making innocent photos of children (e.g., family photos of a young kid during bathtime) have been investigated under child pornography statutes.
The sad state of affairs today is that basically if you have a nude photo of a kid, it is considered "child porn" until proven otherwise. (And given that possession of "child porn" is modern society's most grievous moral offenses, short of actual child molestation, such suspicion is often a horrific ordeal for innocent folks caught up in it.) For some bizarre reason, society as a whole has adopted a notion of sexualization of nude images of children, even as we strongly punish anyone who seeks to sexualize children directly. It's only in a nation obsessed with such puritanical views of nude bodies that we can get to this point -- nude bodies are simply NOT by default sexual, whether they are children, adults, or whatever.
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?