“Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have chose to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed”.
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Vietnamese children flee site of napalm attack in South Vietnam on June 8, 1972. When Facebook removed Aftenposten’s picture of the Vietnam War’s most infamous image, titled “Terror of War” (or colloquially referred to as “napalm girl”), Espen Egil Hansen wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, blasting the site’s censorship practices.
“I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact, even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society”, he wrote. The newspaper then wrote about Egeland’s suspension and why it happened, and the photo was included in its Facebook post.
Protesting Facebook’s move, Solberg re-posted the photo with a black square covering the naked girl, and published a range of other historic images blacking over faces of people such as Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill.
It had initially stood firm in an escalating row – even deleting a post by the Norwegian prime minister that featured the image. It depicts a horrified 9-year-old naked girl named Phan Thị Kim Phuc and other clothed children running away from napalm bombs.
“I appreciate the work of Facebook and other media to stop pictures and content showing abuse and violence”, Solberg said in a comment she posted with the picture. Facebook’s reported firing of human editors, after claims of political bias in the types of stories that were seen on the trending news list, and their replacement with an algorithm resulted in some embarrassment for the company: Several fake-news stories have been shared as real ones, including one Thursday about the iPhone’s launch. “First you create rules that don’t distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs”.
“After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case”, Facebook said in a later statement, adding it recognised “the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time”.
Hansen called Zuckerberg “the world’s most powerful editor” and leader of a platform which is “for the pleasure and benefit of the whole world”.
A Facebook spokeswoman told the Guardian: “While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s hard to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others”. Prime Minister Erna Solberg joined them on Friday.
Facebook also said it will review the process that judges what is appropriate and what isn’t, especially in reference to images of historical standing. “We are always looking to improve our policies to make sure they both promote free expression and keep our community safe”.
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Egeland’s original post discussed “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare”.
