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Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

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Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#151

Post by beachy »

aetherson wrote: post #61
inputcoffee wrote: post #53

Would we say: 1. The process worked. Facebook looked it over, reasoned about it, and changed their minds. Kudos to them for admitting a mistake. 2. It took a media uproar to make a change like this. The process is broken. There has to be a better way to make these changes. 3. There was no right objective answer in the first place, so the process is inherently political. I am leaning towards #3. Want to know what the…

When "the process" that "worked" involved a head of state of a top 30 GDP country getting their post in support deleted before ending up coming up in your favor, then you definitely do not have any evidence that there is a real process that can work.

Yeah, And in this case, it took a head of state to get one of the most instantly recognisable war photos of all time past the Facebook censors.

That photo was said by some to have been instrumental in bringing home to Americans the brutal effect of the war. It may have actually contributed to shortening the war.

Now imagine if the Vietnam war was underway right now, and that photo was taken 24 hours ago.

Would it be seen on Facebook? No way.

Their system is utterly broken.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#152

Post by Intermernet »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #111
ucaetano wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites." This photo was taken by a photographer employed by a private company, then published by a private company, awarded a prize by a private organization. Not much has changed.

The alternative is something like socialism or communism. No thanks.

I was thinking about this the other day. I'm of the opinion that the main problem with Socialism or Communism is exactly the same problem as with Capitalism or "Free Market" economics.

Human greed.

They're all viable theories of how to structure a society, but they all fail when the people in power decide to put their own interests in front of the needs of the general populous.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#153

Post by mei0Iesh »

Freak_NL wrote: post #149
mei0Iesh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't people talk about https://wire.com/ ? It's encrypted and mostly open source. It has the most features I've seen including multiple devices, group chat, audio, desktop app.

Is it really a solution to the walled gardens people are stuck in now? The clients are open, so presumably it would be possible (and encouraged?) to write a custom client. That is definitely a big plus. But it still looks like a centralized communication protocol that depends on proprietary servers and a private network to use. The issue with the walled gardens we're seeing (this week with this iconic photograph) is…

I understand that feeling, but it's too idealistic to be practical right now. We have to accept that convenience has won. These types of social networks depend on a critical mass of users. If the choice is to hold onto principles and lose, or compromise for now closer to the direction we want, then I think we should use Wire. It is the best chance we have for a service that could become popular enough, with people behind it who might embrace it being an open standard. There are no realistic alternatives in this mobile dominated walled-garden world. Most don't even have a desktop client, and require a phone number.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#154

Post by Freak_NL »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #153
Freak_NL wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a solution to the walled gardens people are stuck in now? The clients are open, so presumably it would be possible (and encouraged?) to write a custom client. That is definitely a big plus. But it still looks like a centralized communication protocol that depends on proprietary servers and a private network to use. The issue with the walled gardens we're seeing (this week with this iconic photograph) is…

I understand that feeling, but it's too idealistic to be practical right now. We have to accept that convenience has won. These types of social networks depend on a critical mass of users. If the choice is to hold onto principles and lose, or compromise for now closer to the direction we want, then I think we should use Wire. It is the best chance we have for a service that could become popular enough, with people be…

Even if we disregard its flaws, why would the masses migrate to Wire? Or Telegram, or Signal for that matter. I don't deny that it's a lot better than WhatsApp, but it still faces the same problem as any other alternative; the masses aren't using it.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#155

Post by zouhair »

manachar wrote: post #51

An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites. No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else". This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Fac…

I think we need laws that when a website has a certain number of users it should be considered a public space and not private one anymore.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#156

Post by randycupertino »

adiM wrote: post #131
idrios wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low maintenance, easy to ignore, clear purpose. I can use it to stay connected with colleagues without seeing photos of their wedding or baby pictures. There's no wall where people can publicly write to me, I don't get notified when it's my friend's birthday, my friends can't tag me in photos. I don't like the LinkedIn newsfeed very much but at least on mine I mostly only see people who have changed jobs or see jobs…

Thanks for your reply. I have an account on LinkedIn but don't login often. LinkedIn keeps bombarding me with reminders about people work anniversaries, reminders of waiting invitations, etc. It gets annoying very quickly. Whenever I do login, I see stories that my friends have shared, who they have endorsed, etc. It does appear as irrelevant as Facebook

What, you mean you don't want to add some dude you sold a couch to on Craigslist in 2009 to Your Professional Network?! Why not??? (No thanks, Linkedin. No thanks.)

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#157

Post by vidarh »

nyreed wrote: post #6

Too little too late? They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country. That must surely be a tipping point?

Too little too late, but it will mean that more people who get censored will kick up a fuzz over it, hopefully, and force them to reconsider more widely in the future.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#158

Post by vidarh »

beachy wrote: post #151
aetherson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When "the process" that "worked" involved a head of state of a top 30 GDP country getting their post in support deleted before ending up coming up in your favor, then you definitely do not have any evidence that there is a real process that can work.

Yeah, And in this case, it took a head of state to get one of the most instantly recognisable war photos of all time past the Facebook censors. That photo was said by some to have been instrumental in bringing home to Americans the brutal effect of the war. It may have actually contributed to shortening the war. Now imagine if the Vietnam war was underway right now, and that photo was taken 24 hours ago. Would it be…

This is an important point, particularly considering official Norwegian policy for most of the Vietnam war was to not question the US warfare.

There'd have been no way a Norwegian government at that time would have objected to censorship of an image like this, not least because everyone knew that the US would have reacted strongly, given that the most senior Nordic politician who dared speak up caused quite a stir:

When the then Minister of Education in Sweden, Olof Palme (later PM), took part in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1968, the US withdrew their ambassador from Sweden. In 1972, he as a PM compared the US bombing of Hanoi to the bombing of Guernica, and the US froze diplomatic relations with Sweden for a year as punishment.

Norway itself saw a spate of people imprisoned for refusing conscription citing Norwegian NATO membership and the US war in Vietnam (I have an uncle that was in prison for that; my dad was also imprisoned for refusing conscription in part because of the past Norwegian attitudes to the Vietnam war, though his case happened after the war had ended - it took years before the Vietnam wars effect refusing conscription subsided)

It's easy to stand up for free speech when it involves something this old. It's far harder to stand up for it when it is happening.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#159

Post by rpeden »

intrasight wrote: post #123

Inquiring minds want to know - was it a stupid algorithm or a stupid person at Facebook that deleted those posts.

It wouldn't even need to be a stupid person. Just a person who probably won't get in trouble for erring on the side of caution, but could face serious consequences for failing to enforce Facebook's policies.

That's usually a decent approach, and in most cases it doesn't cause an uproar. In the few cases where it does, the hot potato gets tossed up the chain of command until someone reverses the decision.

Or, as others have mentioned, the deletion was triggered automatically when the image was flagged by too many people. I sympathize with the deletion algorithm here. If I slave over a hot CPU all day just trying to do my job, the last thing I want to do is get sent to /dev/null because I failed to delete an image that really was inappropriate.

Re: Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

#160

Post by kijin »

gwright wrote: post #124
Joeboy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.

The two ideas are certainly related but they are also different in very significant ways. Conflating the two makes discussion of these concepts imprecise and muddled. The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platform…

Legal obligation, of course not. I don't think anyone involved in the current incident was arguing for a legal obligation for Facebook to do anything in particular.

Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.

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