In its statement on the matter Friday, Facebook said it would “adjust our review mechanisms to permit sharing of the image going forward”.
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The tech giant said it had “listened to the community” and acknowledged the “global importance” of the photo. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.
After Nick Ut’s photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a street after being injured in a napalm attack on her village in 1972 was excised from Egeland’s Facebook page, Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published the picture on its Facebook page, which was also censored.
Facebook has reversed its controversial decision to censor a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam war because it shows a naked child.
The image is iconic: A naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War, tears streaming down her face. Facebook had also removed the photo from the page of the woman who had been photographed as a girl.
“Today, pictures are such an important element in making an impression, that if you edit past events or people, you change history and you change reality”, Solberg told the AP earlier Friday, adding it was the first time one of her Facebook posts was deleted.
“It shows that using social media can make (a) political change even in social media”.
On Friday, Aftenposten splashed the photo on its front page and ran an open letter to Zuckerberg from editor-in-chief Espen Egil Hansen blasting Facebook for “abusing [its] power” and threatening editorial freedom. Ms Solberg had posted the picture in the name of freedom of expression amid a brewing debate in Norway.
Tom Egeland, the author whose Facebook account had been suspended over the affair, also expressed his pleasure.
Facebook deleted the photo.
“Now I’m happy!” he tweeted.
“To all who said ‘there’s no point, ‘ yes there is a point”.
Norwegians rose to his defense by publishing the photo, posts that Facebook also deleted in line with its rules barring nudity.
Nick Ut, Terror of War (1972).
At the end of 2015, the fund owned 0.52 percent of Facebook.
“Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful editor-in-chief in the world”, Mr Hansen, whose newspaper has a print circulation of 200,000, said in an interview Friday.
After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case.
“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. The company has in the past blocked seminal artworks because they featured nudity. “This lowest common denominator is a very unsafe mechanism when it is implemented by the most influential editor-in-chief in the world”, he said in reference to Mr Zuckerberg.
But it fell foul of Facebook’s community guidelines which stipulate no nudity and was removed.
“It’s an interesting dilemma because you’ve got a newsworthy historical image that has been published by traditional news media that was effectively censored by a social network”, said Steve Jones, University of IL at Chicago communications professor.
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Forty-five years later, the social network that can deliver news to almost 2 billion people treated the same picture like it was child porn.
