> 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?
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.