The incident highlights the vast quandary Facebook finds itself in as both the most powerful distributor of the world’s media and an inconsistent gatekeeper to sensitive, graphic, or otherwise potentially-objectionable content-two things that necessarily overlap in a free press charged with reporting on the ills of the world.
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Earlier today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was criticised after the social network deleted a post featuring the girl’s photo.
Hours later, Ms. Solberg’s post – which included the image – was removed from her account.
Facebook’s statement said it will adjust its review mechanisms to permit sharing of the image going forward.
They initially said the picture violated its community standards against nudity.
“In this case, we recognise the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time”, the company said in a statement.
“What they do by removing images of this kind, whatever (the) good intentions, is to edit our common history”, Solberg told the Norwegian news agency NTB. It also said it would talk to publishers.
But it fell foul of Facebook’s community guidelines which stipulate no nudity and was removed. “At each of these layers, someone could remove something the rules actually allow, or allow something the rules actually prohibit”. “We really don’t know how these decisions are made so there’s not a lot of accountability either necessarily”.
The company relies on its users to flag objectionable content in the vast majority of cases. Facebook is not a single community.
Facebook is learning a lesson in free speech and perhaps also history.
The image shows screaming children running from a burning Vietnamese village. But late Friday it said it would allow sharing of the photo. “This is an issue of judgment of what does and does not violate terms of service, not of the technology that is used to enforce those terms”.
Facebook earned the ire of one of Norway’s biggest newspapers this week after they deleted a post because it contained a famously provocative picture from the Vietnam War. Facebook later restored the video after public outcry. “But Facebook gets it wrong when it censors pictures like these”.
Still, Mr. Zuckerberg often insists that Facebook is simply a platform.
“I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly”, Aftenposten editor-in-chief Espen Egil Hansen wrote.
“Listen, Mark, this is serious”, Hansen wrote.
The deleted image, known as “The Terror of War”, was shot by Nick Ut in 1972 and won a Pulitzer Prize. The media played a decisive role in reporting different stories about the war than the men in charge wanted them to publish.
Two weeks ago the best-selling Norwegian author Tom Egeland wrote a Facebook post about the “photographs that changed the history of warfare”, according to The Guardian. “Facebook’s treatment of Aftenposten is another proof of the importance of this”. “Editors can not live with you, Mark, as a master editor”.
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As the sequence of events made global news, Facebook later confirmed it was reversing its policy on the photograph. “Otherwise we risk more censorship”, she said. Its $891 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, had a stake of 0.52 percent in Facebook worth $1.54 billion at the start of 2016.
