The PM posted a criticism saying Facebook should "review its editing policy".
And then Facebook deleted that.
I can concede that there could be good reasons to pull the photo. But I don't see good reasons to pull the PM's post. I don't like any organization having so much power to make criticism about itself disappear.
> Erna Solberg, the Conservative prime minister, called on Facebook to “review its editing policy” after it deleted her post voicing support for a Norwegian newspaper that had fallen foul of the social media giant’s guidelines.
> Solberg was one of a string of Norwegian politicians who shared the iconic image after Facebook deleted a post from Tom Egeland...,
> > > shared the iconic image
....
That's all I was trying to say. The way the two cited sentences are written — and "her post" os on a different sentence from "who shared the iconic image" — does not say the image share was in the same post as the one being talked about.
I hate the power Facebook as a behemoth and a monolith holds and abuses. But when accusing, we should be fair. The statements cited as evidence are from a publication, not an offhand comment by a random person on Facebook with no regard to correctness or clarity. And even in that, there isn't clarity for what was being accused.
So, if pointing out a lack of clarity in an accusation is called nitpicking, so be it.
It seems like purely reposting a photo without comment could now be being called a post of support. While fb users can use whatever slang they like, I expect a media that assumes we don't know about these behaviors in the walled gardens and tells us what specifically was censored.
(Perhaps this seems like splitting hairs to FB users, but as a non-user of a communication network, I would tolerate a network that bans pictures of blue but not a network that bans criticism of its ban of pictures of blue. The latter requires government intervention.)
Such as................................................................................?
It could offend some peoples sensibilities? Fuck them. Let's try to remember the costs of war eh.
Yeah?
Napalm girl is a powerful photo. So are photos of Aushwitz. So too are photos of trench warfare. Saddam Hussein's hanging is historically important, as are all the images of children killed in Aleppo, or drowned families washing up on shores in Italy.
That doesn't mean we need all these things on Facebook.
I'm sensitive to censorship, and Facebook is a powerful and important platform for sharing, but I'm not prepared to say every photo of historical significance must necessarily be allowed.
But if you claim the mantle of "we" that is supposed to have special privileges on deciding who needs what on Facebook - I'd really like to know how comes you got this privilege and where it comes from. And no, "think of the kids!!!" is not a good answer.
Facebook is a publishing and communications platform and if I can't use it to discuss politics or history with my list of acquaintances, then it's useless to me.
Also, in case you have children, it would be best if they didn't have FB accounts with strangers in their list. Just saying, historical photos is probably your last problem.
What is this supposed to mean? There are adults too.
You seem to be falling into the fallacy of protecting kids by prohibiting adults from engaging in adult behavior.
Since Facebook's entire point is that feeds are receiver-specific, "think of the children"-style arguments based on "...with kids on it" may provide a good reason for establishing controls that prevent certain content from going into the feeds of children, but has a much harder time justify preventing the content from being shared on Facebook at all.
A Facebook spokeswoman said: “While we recognise that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others. We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community."
No it's not. 99% of photos of nude children are fine. Children are born nude. Most very young children play nude for many hours a day. They don't have, or at least the ones I know don't have, any matching sense of self-consciousness or modesty for the misguided cultural copy-paste being applied here.
If a photograph is pornographic, then someone will report it immediately, and facebook can take action.
And no matter how difficult it might be in some strange edge cases to decide whether something is "pornographic" (in reality, these cases are probably very rare), this photograph is obviously not pornographic is any sense of the word.
When I say 'easily available' people might misconstrue the statement; so, again, it is relatively easy to acquire child porn and stay anonymous(e.g. no repercussions) if you wanted to do so.
We as society should not allow censorship on this premise; what is the underlying ideology? That once this photo is accepted mainstream people will start posting pedo-porn obfuscated as war crimes?
Spoiler: this photo has existed for quite a while and that has unsurprisingly not happened.
People are meta. You can't optimize against them in this authoritarian manner. Most humans just want the truth; hiding a child in pain from her environmental circumstances just because she's naked is not the solution and it looks orwellian.
Great job Zuck.
Not in 'Muricia. Nude baby at beach = lifeguard called.
Just because distinguishing between mere nudity and inappropriate nudity may be difficult in some cases doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, or, moreover, that it isn't necessary to be done in order to "find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves and while maintaining a safe and respectful experience".
Incidentally, protecting people from things that they neither need nor want protection from can be at least as disrespectful as exposing them to things that they wish to avoid.
In a setting where respite from a resource is a click-away, I think that it's always more disrespectful to "protect" people from things from which they ask not to be protected.
Isn't that the same argument we use for things like BitTorrent?
People don't want a centralized authority controlling free speech. Democracy is what's needed in this context and it's going to be messy(read:human, we're all messy).
>I'm sensitive to censorship, and Facebook is a powerful and important platform for sharing, but I'm not prepared to say every photo of historical significance must necessarily be allowed.
False. If you think 'powerful' means big enough to censor things for everyone then you are not sensitive to censorship for rational values of censorship. We all deserve reality.
What is your argument against this photo? Too 'powerful' for a child to see? Are parents no longer held responsible for their own children? Are we all considered children now?
Who shouldn't see this, and why? Explain it exactly, not with 'feel good' stupidity.
So is reality.
The Earth has children on it <gasp!>
You have to draw a line somewhere. No naked children or gore seems reasonable.
You, as a user, can try to draw the line by controlling your feed, that's your responsibility. But you agreed to be exposed to other people's content when you joined the site - that's the entire point of it.
We, as a society, have no responsibility at all to "draw a line" anywhere to cater to you, and neither does Facebook (nor should it, in my opinion, except where the law forces it to.) Freedom of expression is a right, but freedom from offense in a public space isn't.
"No naked children or gore" is not at all reasonable, on a site with over a billion users, and a billion different use cases.
Thus it seems unlikely that they can admit that there are a lot of under-13 kids on their service, without creating the chance that some enterprising fed will take a look at their COPPA compliance. This will hopefully have the side effect of reducing the value of "for the kids!!" arguments.
That's not a good argument. You can apply filters only for accounts used by kids, and only in jurisdictions where it's required by law.
Why do they do more than what is required by law or opted-in by the user?
For example, from the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights, Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
It's my opinion that Facebook is impeding on that right, and that it's going to come back to bite them at some point.
I would expect not, but that means there's a line somewhere. Where is it?
Nobody's spraypainting on Facebook's house here. They're using it as it was intended: as a method of one-to-many communication for messages which contain nothing illegal.
The public thrives on the basis of such "dumb carriers" as the internet itself.
I can forsee either regulation or self imposed ubiquitous clear CATEGORIES of rights for speech from users on sites and applications similar to software licensing.
You would have a Facebook under the <Proprietary license> A Facebook under the <Academic Free License> A Facebook under the <GNU General Public License> A Facebook under the <MIT License>
either under a parent company or as distinct entity. Some are free, some cost money, some may receive tax benefit or government subsidy, all according to how they align with net neutrality regulations, are staffed and moderated.
Is there free access to anyone to do same?
What ove a telephone line over which only specific messages may be sent?
What of a wireless earpiece connection over which only designated messages may be sent, or to which only designated devices may connect?
Can you name any "line", at all, in any sort of dilemma? Obviously it's okay for you to gently tip on the shoulder of someone blocking your way in certain situations, but in other's it's rude, not to mention "physically interacting" with them with more force and different intentions. Where do you draw "THE LINE"? Between being polite and being impolite, as well as being impolite and assault? How would you write the rule book to determine it in any situation for a minimum wage Facebook employee or algorithm so they wouldn't have to apply any of their own judgement? And just because you couldn't, just because nobody including God could, would you still refrain from judging even extreme cases with some certainty?
So? You know, maybe at least try to answer that, as a thought experiment and learning experience for yourself.
We saw with the Microsoft antitrust case, the government stepping in where a business had grown to the point where it had a dangerous level of control and influence financially; I'm not sure if there's a social equivalent?
When the normal checks of a single business dominating a field fail, we need to find new solutions, especially when that field is communication. We don't want a future in which Facebook is non-democratic, but everyone gets their media from it and can't see a good reason to leave. I would hope that over the long term, we figure out public ownership of social media, and enshrine control and understanding of the systems that bring you information as an important right.
I wouldn't call the network effect so much a "really interesting problem" but more like "one of the many well known failure modes in the fantasy that market effects lead to the 'best' outcomes for any definition of 'best' that isn't tautologically defined as whatever market effects cause to happen."
So just playing the "but it's their walled garden" card does not cut it for me.
For me the question is whether facebook has a significant influence on the population or not. I think they already do when it comes to News, more so than traditional news organizations even. On top of that, they claim to provide an open space for exchange and even discussion.
Personally, I'd therefore like to see facebook being regulated to the point where they cannot simply refuse "service" to people of certain completely legal opinions discussing legal topics, same as they and other businesses should not be allowed to refuse service for certain classes of people.
The current state of copyright and tech access law makes that inordinately difficult. If we update these laws, it will be much simpler for competitors to challenge the lumbering incumbents like Facebook and Twitter, and then it won't matter so much what Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey want to allow or disallow.
The free exchange format the internet offered is threatened by walled gardens becoming the home of 99% of online activity. Even something like Google struggles in light of this, since they aren't allowed to get in and make intelligent calculations about the popularity of online resources (which used to be roughly determinable by links mined out from the open internet).
We are in trouble here.
I hear this a lot and wonder what people did before social media, and before FB was around. It's the same thing. I closed my account probably 5 years ago and don't miss a thing. My friends are on FB, but I still know what's going because they use multiple platforms, we text and we still use email - so not having FB isn't a deal breaker.
The downside to this is people have lost the ability to effectively communicate with each other. If the only way you have to communicate with your friends and family is FB, then this is the onset of the decline of Western Civilization.
But i don't think there are major obstacles to introduce such law in germany/europe. We already have media-laws and special press-laws (which regulate how stories must be published, for example we have a "journalistic duty of care" which amongst other things mandates that unconfirmed statements must be marked as such. The law follows the codex of the German Press Council).
That is not what happens in a monopoly. We have old laws but the spirit of monopoly fighting is that they can't do whatever they want.
Specific legal structures protecting speech rights are government grants, within those legal constructs. The legal doctrine of the US First Amendment free speech tradition is that it is a broad, but not absolute, limit on government prior suppression of speech rights. It specifically doesn't apply to private individual or corporate limitations on speech.
The history of free speech protections in the US is complex and surprisingly recent. It wasn't until 1919 that Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Supreme Court dissent laid the basis for what would become seen as a very broad free-speech protection. Note that as a dissent, his views didn't carry at the time.
It wasn't until further cases in the 1930s and 1960s that the present regime of protected speech -- protected from government interference -- fully came into being in the US.
See: http://www.worldcat.org/title/great-dissent-how-oliver-wende...
Facebook is a global coffee house. Everyone can be there at the same time. But that also means it is very hard to use an alternative, especially as Facebook buys relevant competitors of information exchange like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Suddenly, we are in a situation where more people can connect than ever before, but for the vast majority of people, because of convenience and the lack of tenable other options, there is hardly any other choice. Other social networks that simply tried to clone Facebook never got off the ground because everyone was already on Facebook. I would truly love to close my account and leave but it's hard to stay in touch with friends from outside the United States, especially if Instagram and WhatsApp are out of the question.
Given Facebook's overwhelming presence in modern daily life, it is necessary to regulate what it can or cannot do for the benefit of the common citizens. The degree of regulation will always be debated, and rightly so, but to pretend that a private entity of immense social might is free to do as it pleases is to willingly give away power and authority from the state, and in a democracy, from the people themselves.
EDIT: wow, downvoted to hell for this one. It would be so fascinating if just one person could describe what makes my view so wrong.
Arguing in favour of democracy does mean limiting some people's opportunity to make money. That can make it an unpopular view.
(Independent of regulatory capture and governmental corruption, of course. The point being that the people are in charge, not what they do with their wallets, because otherwise we end up with an oligopoly.)
If I own a coffeeshop today, I would have the right to restrict what is hung on my walls (e.g. advertisements, local events), and what is announced (i.e. someone loudly giving an announcement) to my patrons. I may not be able to control small group conversation though.
That being said, posting something publicly to Facebook is greatly different than DMing a person / group of friends. If Facebook deleted the image sent from one friend to the other, this would be a different conversation. I think your analogy and inspection of the constitution's intent, even further justifies that Facebook has right to do what they did.
Ok you know what? This analogy falls apart because the mediums of exchange are so vastly different there really isn't any comparison, so I really don't see how Facebook is in the right on this. I already said people can go to other "taverns," but comparing physical locations and Internet social networks is like comparing apples and Orange County, California.
It's not very hard. There are literally thousands of popular forums that are not facebook.
> Given Facebook's overwhelming presence in modern daily life, it is necessary to regulate
No it's not. The fact that you are frequenting a particular site does not give you the power over other people, neither should it.
http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-engagement-stati...
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/576d559e52bcd05c658...
Global monthly active users, millions:
* Facebook: 1,650
* Tumblr: 550
* Instagram: 500
* Twitter: 310
* Snapchat:300
* Pinterest: 150
* LinkedIn: 100
For monthly hours engaged: http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time/
Facebook sees 7h 45m monthly, vs. 1h 47m for Google, on roughly the same monthly users (153m vs. 138m).
Note that Google, a company with a $525 billion market cap, and a platform with a nominal 3.2 billion accounts, still manages to net only 5-20 million users with one or more monthly public posts. A topic on which I can claim some expertise. And the network doesn't even register above.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&ei=xhbTV9nNIo...
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/51205/20150506/many-users-...
Of course, if your goal is to see cat pictures on the biggest social network there is in existence, then you have no alternative but Facebook. But I question this goal has any value at all. Facebook may have millions of posts every second, but you will never know about it, will never see them and will never interact with their creators in any way.
If your purpose is to spread your ads to as many people as possible, billion-sized site is also providing reach second to none. But I personally have very little interest about the optimal spread of advertisement, and so does about 99.999% of people that do not work in ad business.
In short, I see nothing that makes Facebook more than a) Schelling point that can be easily replaced with another one, and b) so-so platform to waste one's time because why not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style
I'm noting this as an example of a widely-shared piece of content that I'm aware of. I'm also having trouble turning up widely-shared content Facebook-specific stats.
"An Anatomy of Large Facebook Share Cascades" mentions a case of 600,000 re-shares. That's a substantial fraction of total Facebook users.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-ana...
A listing of ten-most-popular Facebook posts of 2014 gives values into the 3 million range.
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2014/12/22/facebook-most-shared...
What I've looked at is the distribution of posts on specific topics of intellectual interest, as compared with nonintellectual discussions. Total community size matters, though it's not a total determinant. Smaller communities with good discussion characteristics (say, Reddit) come close to matching Facebook on actual discussion, and very small communities such as Metafilter actually have very high ratios of relevant discussion, though these may omit specific domain or topic experts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
On a similar basis, if you want to find any one particular subset of people, you're in general going to find that in a larger rather than smaller network. Of course, if you know which specific group you're trying to target, then there may be other networks of specific interest. In the case you make, of seeking out family, friends, or shared interests, in general, Facebook is that network, and the attempts of other networks to challenge Facebook on the basis of social graph has typically failed. Challengers who have succeeded have generally done so on other bases -- intrest graph (Reddit), specific subset networks (e.g., Slack), or 1:1 communications (Snapchat).
Of material I've posted for which I have available stats, I'm aware of reach on the order of thousands to tens of thousands of unique readers, and no, not on Facebook (I don't make use of the platform). That's pretty good, though I find that where there are very specific people I'm interested in corresponding with, reaching out to them specifically (usually through email) is the most effective means.
So? How it's relevant to the discussion at hand? Of course youtube is a great platfrom for pop-artists. But we aren't pop artists. And there were platforms before youtube and undoubtedly would be ones after.
> (it broke the YouTube counter).
It didn't, it was a joke/publicity stunt: http://www.cnet.com/news/gangnam-style-busts-youtubes-view-c...
> In the case you make, of seeking out family, friends, or shared interests, in general, Facebook is that network,
I have varied interests, and virtually none of them I found on Facebook or they depend on Facebook in any significant capacity. True, I can find some materials regarding to my interests on facebook, and some people sharing these interests are present on facebook, but none of it makes facebook irreplaceable. In fact, if facebook disappeared this second, it would be no more than minor inconvenience for any of the interests I share. Beyond certain point, unless your interests are either extremely rare or extremely broad, size of the network matters very little. If another billion people joins Facebook, it won't change my life even a little.
It may make next Psy earn more millions or billions, and make ad makers' profits soar to the skies, but to my life - and, I am sure, life of about 90% of Earth population - nothing would happen.
> "An Anatomy of Large Facebook Share Cascades" mentions a case of 600,000 re-shares
So what? Yes, cat pictures get shared a lot. Picture of Obama winning election probably even more. Information content of either is very close to zero, and neither is necessary for anything - Facebook is a crappy platform for being informed about political matters (even leaving the question of confirmed bias aside) and cat pictures are not something one can't live without anyway.
> Smaller communities with good discussion characteristics (say, Reddit) come close to matching Facebook on actual discussion
Facebook is one of the most crappiest platform in existence for actual discussion. Only twitter is worse, and that is because it's impossible to hold a conversation there at all, by design. Reddit is way better but that's a low bar to clear - most of discussion on Reddit, by volume, is garbage, with small pockets of excellent content if you can find them.
I wasn't aware of counter/hoax status, though I've bumped into int limits myself, so found it plausible. Thanks for the information.
Your personal experience on any social network is almost never a solid basis for extrapolating to others' experience. That's something my own experience in quantifying the size of active user communities and range of conversation across networks has established quite clearly. It's an argument I've long since tired of.
On G+, the median number of followers for a non-publicly active profile -- 94% of all profiles -- is two. For profiles with any public posting activity at all, it's slightly higher: five.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTN...
The median friend count on Facebook is 200 as of 2014, and the network is used by 57% of all American adults:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-...
Your original contention was that "There are literally thousands of popular forums that are not facebook." My response was that there are at best very few platforms which can match Facebook for general discussion. Something I've studied directly, in large part because I'm interested in finding good general discussion.
I'm also not a Facebook user, because I find the morals and practices of the company and its founder dispicable. A frequent affliction of mine, as a brief perusal of my G+ profile may indicate.
My larger points are these:
* On any given topic, for any given discussion, odds are far higher of finding a relevant discussion group on Facebook than on virtually any other platform, with the possible exception of Reddit.
* For any mass media online message, such as, say, the Prime Minister of Norway might care to engage in, Facebook is, hands down, it. Nothing else, not Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Usenet, not nothin', will compare. (You've been, I'll note, peculiarly silent on offering specific alternatives.) I'm not saying that this is my specific use case. I am saying that if it were, FB is reigning king.
Your observations on the specifics of conversation on Facebook as opposed to other platforms matches my own direct quantified research to a large extent. You might care to look again (or for the first time?) at the link I posted above. "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web":
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
Yes, Reddit beats out FB, though Metafilter knocks out both on the basis of relevant discussion, albeit at vastly smaller scale. Blogs in particular score exceptionally highly for content, but have a discoverability problem -- again, FB can address that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-par...
I would think that getting denounced by the public would also be bad for said bottom line.
Wouldn't it be in Facebooks best interest to cater to the public as much as possible?
I use Path with my family for photo sharing. Everything else gets put on my blog.
I find Facebook usage to be a tell for personal insecurity. It's ok- everyone is insecure in their teens. But when you get past 35, if you are still a heavy Facebook user, it indicates personal problems.
Freedom of speech and freedom of expression mean that the government can't put you in prison or punish you for saying or believing what you do. Facebook aren't the government, they're a private entity and don't have to host anything they don't like- including hosting photos that they don't like. It's a walled garden, and it's their walled garden, and if you don't like it you're welcome to leave.
And on the other hand: it's the only garden. If your friends are in that garden, they can't share with you, interact with you, etc, without you also being inside. Facebook's created a 'with us or not with us' distinction that has a very sharp boundary. And it's worked- they've won the social network wars. A billion people are on it.
The question is, as the social network champions does Facebook have to have to public's interests in mind or just their own bottom line profit margin? As a public company, the shareholders will fire their leadership if they don't choose the bottom line. As the major social network of the world, the public will denounce them for actions like this.