Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices

Re:Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices by pron on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @10:11AM (#3562029)

Great! So what I'm saying is that I find it interesting that Facebook, a large corporation, is now a major force in deciding what is normal in society and what isn't. It's not a TV broadcast network (that has to get a license from the government and whose content is under regulation), but a private website. Other websites, like tumblr, don't have any qualms with international dissemination of breastfeeding material or with promoting women's bodies as sexual objects or otherwise.

My point is that Facebook, which is not (or hardly) subject to any governmental regulation, has become the focus of such a statement.

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Re:Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices by rsanders on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @10:28AM (#3562091)

You're right, it's an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think it's new. For better or worse, Facebook has become the primary (and often only) way I communicate with the majority of my friends and family. While there is certainly an important legal distinction between government censorship and private censorship, the effect here is indistinguishable.

And it's not the first time. The USA used to have rules governing how much of an area's media channels could be owned by a single corporation (and thus warped to serve a single set of interests.) There are strong parallels to this situation.

One of the effects of these Too Big/Entrenched To Replace corporations. It is often easier and more effective to change the corporations than to use alternatives, and in many cases, there simply are no viable alternatives.

The people on HN probably care more about having an open web that enables free-as-in-breastfeeding-pictures communication than it does about breastfeeding. One can choose to view this controversy in either context; I care about both, somewhat to my surprise.

(Actually, much of HN appears to care more about "you know what's cool? a hundred billion dollars" than open communication, but that's a different story.)

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Re:Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices by pron on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @10:43AM (#3562177)

Ha! What's that word... oh: LOL!

I think HN-ers don't expect "free-as-in-breastfeeding-pictures" (really liked that) from a company whose business is selling your personal information to advertisers.

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