Facebook has banned one of the most famous images of the Vietnam war—then 9-year-old Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack on her village—for contravening the site's prohibition on "nudity." It even removed a posting of it by the Norwegian Prime Minister.
The editor of Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten said the entire post, which was about iconic war imagery, was later deleted and the account of the reporter behind it suspended.
Espen Egil Hansen has accused Mark Zuckerberg of "an abuse of power".
Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons.
Mr Hansen said the image of Kim Phuc, then aged nine, was removed less than 24 hours after the newspaper received a request from the firm to either take down the image or pixelate it and before it had responded.
Phuc suffered horrific burns in the attack, which she described as "a blast of heat which felt like someone had opened the door of an oven." Photographer Though it was unlikely she'd survive, journalists Nick Ut (who shot the photo) and Christopher Wain took her to hospital and she pulled through. She lives in pain to this day, and the photograph is part of the world's cultural heritage, a powerful warning of the horror of war that has played its part in restraining military policies for decades.
If it becomes too offensive for the public square, it means we've unhooked the ideas of something from its reality, which means the latter is free to remake itself.
But Facebook is not the public square. If anything, it seems to be nearing the "go fuck yourself" stage of response to stuff like this; the media is captive to it and it doesn't have to pretend to care anymore.
The BBC quotes Sue Llewellyn, a "social media consultant":
She also disagreed with Mark Zuckerberg's comments last month that his company is a technology firm, not a media organisation. "You can't be a distributor of news without having editorial responsibilities," she said. "They can't keep washing their hands of it and then censoring content."
Maddeningly naive. Of course they can! As hypocritical and smarmy and holier-than-thou Facebook is about rights and access, it's their website and you can't force them to publish anything they don't want to.
Even if we got Facebook to agree to embody ideals of free expression, even if it believed in them to its core, its nature and vulnerability as a private corporation forces it to act in its own perceived interests when a dilemma presents itself. If you care about being able to say what you want, your only option is not to speechcrop on Facebook. If you're not prepared to leave it for commercial reasons, because it's where the market is, that's cool. But unless it's nationalized and operated as a state-run utility—as if!—Facebook will always have the last word on what you get to say on Facebook.
