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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.