What is morally acceptable to see on a feed for an American is not the same for a Norwegian, a Japanese or a Sudanese. The author mentions sexuality/nudity content here, which is a blatant cultural difference between Europe and the US, but there are so many more regional variations among the hundred of countries where Facebook operates.

Facebook is definitely entitled to censor content as they see fit, but we are also entitled to criticize their policy. Here, it seems that the main criticism is the americano-centric view of what is inadequate content.

Maybe Facebook should look into developing local content rules instead of relying on a guideline written in California by Californians for Californians?

How would such a thing work? Would a user register as a resident of a particular country? Or, IP-based checks of location? I'm a Scot living in America, with Dutch friends - do I see the US, UK, or Euro content? Does the content I see (on the same feed) change based on which country I happen to be in today?

I also think that the policy should apply to the poster, not to the viewers. What makes our world great is its wide range of cultures, and we should not isolate ourselves in little silos. Conversely, we should not allow a single culture to dictate to everybody else what is acceptable or not.

To be fair, I don't think any policy is necessary besides moderating and reporting illegal content. But since Facebook seems quite inclined to go the extra mile to make its platform less offensive, I think this would be a good compromise.

So they really can't have it both ways. If they want to be a source of news, they're going to get flack if they hide stories, even if it was done by an algorithm.

And all of us here know that Facebook is a private company and they can do anything they want, but for the majority of people that use the Internet, Facebook and Google are the Internet to them. So for a lot of people, this feels like Facebook is "censoring the Internet."

No one is surprised a private company censors content, it's the cultural homogenisation on a global service that can grate, even though it's no surprise. A global service that tries very hard to be the global platform for everything, including news publication (that may have been unsuccessful). No surprise after many years of this most people's networks are on Facebook.

No doubt to an American some of the things I, as a Brit, think and do will be plain weird yet Brits are quite close compared to some nations. For all us outsiders, FB (and other US sites) and US attitudes to nudity and violence are, well, interesting. Usually just amusing, sometimes it can be annoying like in the case of this globally famous photo. Don't forget none of us foreigners have a first amendment or rights under it - so that's not even relevant to us.

It wouldn't be that hard to have regional appropriate guidelines for censorship, acceptable behaviour and what have you. Then Americans could have American mores, Norwegians theirs, and we can be confused, amused or fascinated when something goes viral enough to overlap.

I'd like to preserve more of the global differences - it's what makes the world interesting. We might find others do some things better.

Even within a country you can have strongly divided opinions on what's appropriate or inappropriate to be hosted on social media, now not only do you need some way to document these (including refining them as norms change), but you also need to implement a system that can "know it when it sees it" so to speak and filter on the fly. That's either going to be a large number of humans filtering the content more-or-less by hand (already got FB into trouble when the humans filtered stories they didn't agree with) or build an automatic screening process that can make the appropriate decisions on the edge cases, which would be difficult to say the least.

Additionally, you run into the problem that many social groups overlap. How many German users need to be friends with a French user before they're covered in the same filter? What about an American vs Iranian? Ultimately you need some way to decide how to break ties and at the moment they're all breaking on the side of the US because that's where FB is based. Unless that changes, I don't see a shift to fragment what's considered acceptable on the platform.

Note that other big American social media services (Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr for a start) are fine with some various degree of NSFW nudity. Yes, I think Americans overall tend to be a bit more squeamish towards nudity than Europeans, and it shows in our content policies to some degree. But a pretty wide spectrum of opinion exists here; the country Facebook was created in is also the country 4Chan was created in.

I do agree with you that preserving global differences is important, hence why ensuring the web remains "decentralized" is important. Facebook's content policies aren't a big problem as long as there are compelling alternative social media platforms to switch to if you don't like what's going on.

If people are no longer happy with this deal, they are free to look for alternatives, but instead prefer to complain about censorship. It's like going on vacation to England and complaining about the rain.

[1] I should note Facebook already does provide lots of ways to filter people from your feed without unfriending them if you don't like what they post.

They aren't illogically petitioning the government to force them to stop censoring, they are making the public service announcement at other private corporations and may actually be successful in getting the private corporation to stop censoring.

It was successful a few days ago with Napalm girl, so why stop there.

Does everyone think the Aftenposten posts whatever stories it's writers come up with?

I think this was a particularly stupid use of their editorial discretion, but it's their right.