Facebook backtracked Friday on a decision to censor an iconic Vietnam War photo of a naked girl escaping a napalm bombing, after its block on the historic image sparked outrage. Solberg accused Facebook of trying “to edit our common history”. 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.
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A Facebook spokesperson has told media it “recognises” the photo is iconic, but says “it’s hard to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others”.
The revolt escalated on Friday when Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg posted the image on her profile and Facebook deleted that too.
In August, Facebook chose to remove editors for its Trending topics list and leave that influential tool in the hands of an algorithm.
The social network was under vast pressure and ridicule after it emerged the website blocked the photo, which shows the naked 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running away in terror after her village was hit by a napalm attack.
Editor-in-chief Espen Egil Hansen said his newspaper would “not comply” with a request to remove Nick Ut’s 1972 photo that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Facebook’s decision to temporarily censor the iconic Vietnam War photo of Kim Phúc has set off alarm bells for journalism watchdogs and reignited the debate over the social media company’s editorial responsibilities.
Solberg, in her post, also praised Facebook for combating pictures of child abuse.
Facebook said it had “listened to the community” and acknowledged the “global importance” of the photo.
“After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case”, the company said. The company saw fit to censor the image by deleting a post by a Norwegian writer who used the photo.
“The photo should be avai lable for sharing in the coming days”, Facebook said.
The newspaper received an email on Wednesday from Facebook’s office in Hamburg asking that the photo be removed, Hansen said. “If you will not distinguish between child pornography and documentary photographs from a war, this will simply promote stupidity and fail to bring human beings closer to each other”.
“Facebook is not staffed to make those kinds of decisions”, she continued, “and given the challenges they’ve faced with seemingly less fraught efforts like trending, I can’t imagine they will want to anytime soon”.
Like its Scandinavian neighbors, Norway takes pride in its freedom of speech. “This is what you and your subordinates are doing in this case”, he added in the open letter, calling Zuckerberg the world’s most powerful editor.
Facebook said it would review its mechanisms to allow sharing of the image in the future.
However, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that his company isn’t a media company, rather it’s a tech company.
Thanks to both its global reach and the dependence of major news organizations on its platform, Facebook has become an arbiter of what makes news.
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“I appreciate the work of Facebook and other media to stop pictures and content showing abuse and violence”, Solberg wrote, according to Aftenposten.
