The reason? Facebook removed a post published by the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten which contained the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a young girl running naked down a road after being burnt in a napalm attack during the Vietnam war.
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“Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief penned an open letter on Friday criticizing Facebook for deleting a post from their page with the iconic image”.
It all started a few weeks ago when Norwegian author Tom Egeland got on Facebook and shared the photo along with several others that he said changed the history of warfare. The Pulitzer Prize-winning image was shot by Nick Ut, then an Associated Press photographer.
Many Norwegians have posted the photo on Facebook in protest, and Prime Minister Erna Solberg joined them on Friday.
Facebook have somewhat of a blanket rule on these types of images which apply to everyone and every news outlet on the social networking site.
“What they do by removing this kind of image is to edit our common history”, Solberg told the AP in a phone interview.
Facebook initially said the picture, which depicts a nine-year-old naked girl running from a napalm attack, violated its community standards against nudity.
The image later disappeared from the page, though she posted it again on Friday with it and other historic images blacked out.
Aftenposten splashed the Vietnam photograph across the front page of its newspaper on Friday, next to a large Facebook logo, and wrote a front-page editorial headlined “Dear Mark Zuckerberg”, arguing that the network was undermining democracy. “But Facebook gets it wrong when it censors pictures like these”.
“I am anxious that the world’s most important medium is limiting freedom instead of trying to extend it and that this occasionally happens in an authoritarian way”, he wrote. “This lowest common denominator is a very risky mechanism when it is implemented by the most influential editor-in-chief in the world”, he said in reference to Zuckerberg. “But I say no to this type of censorship”. And he’s just one of many people upset with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg after the social media site censored an iconic Vietnam War photo.
The journalist who originally posted the picture, attempted to do so four times and was then banned from Facebook for 24 hours by the community standards team, reports the Financial Times. “It’s important that we all contribute to the fight against violence and physical abuse of children”, the prime minister’s Facebook post said.
This is not the first time Facebook has been accused of censorship, which is problematic because of its growing importance as a key channel of information for many people. “In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time”, Facebook said in a statement.
At first, Facebook defended the decision to remove the photo, providing a statement to outlets including The Wall Street Journal that said it “is hard to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not in others”.
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“We are always looking to improve our policies to make sure they both promote free expression and keep our community safe”.
