Norway’s prime minister joined a campaign by a Norwegian newspaper on Friday accusing Facebook Inc of undue censorship by barring a Vietnam War era news photograph showing a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack.
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Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg then posted the photograph on her own Facebook profile, writing that it had contributed to change the course of world history.
She said: “What (Facebook) do by removing images of this kind, whatever the good intentions, is to edit our common history”.
Captured in 1972 by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nick Ut of the Associated Press, the image of screaming children running from a napalm attack shows a naked nine-year-old girl at its center.
“An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our Community Standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography”, Facebook said in a statement.
Solberg later reposted the image with a black box covering the girl from the thighs up.
“We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community”, Facebook’s statement said.
“Facebook gets it wrong when they censor such pictures”.
Several members of the Norwegian government followed Solberg’s lead and posted the photo on their Facebook pages.
But on Friday it said it would allow sharing of the photo, “because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance”. Facebook quickly deleted it.
Norwegians rose to his defense by publishing the photo, posts that Facebook also deleted in line with its rules barring nudity.
The newspaper Friday published an open letter to Facebook co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg to protest the action. He says Facebook has an algorithm that edits graphic imagery, but having journalists on staff would help Facebook determine whether an image is of historic value, or if it really needs to be censored.
“It will take some time to adjust these systems but the photo should be available for sharing in the coming days”.
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Facebook is due to go on trial in France, where a schoolteacher accused it of censorship for blocking his account after he posted a photo of a painting by 19th-century master Gustave Courbet called “L’Origine du monde” (The Origin of the World) that depicts a woman’s vagina.
