The 1972 image of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running down the street without any clothes after sustaining severe burns in the south Vietnamese napalm attack is one of the serving legacies of the horrors of the Vietnam war.
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However Mr Hansen said that Mr Zuckerberg was “the world’s most powerful editor” as Facebook was “offering us a great channel for distributing our content”.
Taken by Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut Cong Huynh for Associated Press, the picture was honoured with the Pulitzer Prize.
When Prime Minister Erna Solberg wrote a Facebook post in support of the Aftenposten’s stand, which included the photo, she found her post was also deleted.
“Even though I am editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper, I have to realize that you are restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility”, he wrote.
Norway’s largest newspaper is blasting Facebook for deleting an iconic photograph of a naked child during the Vietnam War from its Facebook page-and suspending the writer who posted it. “Our solutions won’t always be flawless, but we will continue to try to improve our policies and the ways in which we apply them”.
Egeland’s post discussed “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare” – a group to which the “napalm girl” image certainly belongs. Would you once again intercept the documentation of cruelties, just because a tiny minority might possibly be offended by images of naked children, or because a paedophile person somewhere might see the picture as pornography?
The photo was removed for violating Facebook’s policy on nudity, then Egeland’s account was suspended for 24 hours.
The CEO of Aftenpost’s publisher, Schibsted Media Group, said Facebook had tried to stop the newspaper publishing “one of the most important photos of our time”.
Hansen told CNNMoney’s Nina Dos Santos on Friday that Zuckerberg is now “the most influential editor-in-chief in the world”.
It’s a response unlikely to please Hansen.
Facebook said in a statement its rules were more blunt than the company itself would prefer, adding that restrictions on nudity were necessary on a global platform.
“We are a tech company, not a media company”, he said. “We do not produce any of the content”.
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Facebook was engulfed by controversy in May over how news stories were chosen for its “trending topics” box.
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Hansen’s suggestions for Facebook to improve its behavior include “geographically differentiated guidelines and rules for publication”, “distinguish [ing] between editors and other Facebook users”, and a “comprehensive review of the way you operate”. Last month, it removed the humans responsible for manually writing news descriptions and headlines for the section, turning the job over to software programs.
