Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo
wsj.com
wsj.com
No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else".
This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Facebook be forced to allow porn as something that is protected by freedom of expression?
On the flip side, as more and more of meaningful speech occurs on these not-really-public forums of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, there exists quite a bit of unease on my part for these global companies to insist on narrowing expression on these platforms to that which they deem acceptable by whatever internal process they desire.
Facebook's study that showed they could manipulate people's feelings by altering the feed algorithm indicates this is an awful lot of power handed to a company focused on making profits and staying on the good side of governmental organizations.
YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.
This would likely be okay if there were real public space on the web, but it currently operates more as a series of visits to other people's private property. The release valve is a persons ability to create their own corner of the internet, but even this must leap through various ISP and web host providers terms of service. Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere?
Cases like this photo will only become more apparent as time goes on. I'm not sure how society will negotiate these ideas, but at present, the commercial interests are leading the conversation in their favor.
-No porn on Facebook is the equivalent to no nudity allowed at the mall.
-Banning users is the equivalent of kicking a person out of the mall.
-Censoring messages is the equivalent of... uh.. gagging a person just before they can say something you didn't want them to say.
-Direct messaging people or groups is the equivalent of talking to your friends, while an anonymous person videotapes and listens without really letting you know they're doing that.
-Posting a status is the equivalent of shouting what you're feeling or thinking to nobody in particular
-Facebook curating newsfeeds is the equivalent of putting you in a room and showing videos of the things your friends are shouting, intermittently throwing in advertisements, and just kind of letting you believe that what you're seeing is real and unadulterated.
Point is, if you look at Facebook like a physical establishment, it's a pretty weird place.
But as long as people continue to recognize that censorship and surveillance are not cool, they will continue to complain to the groups who engage in it, and constantly be on the lookout for better alternatives.
I personally recommend Snapchat for un-surveilled interaction with friends, Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary, and LinkedIn to stay connected with people. And I'm glad that there are reasonable alternatives to all of these
There are ways to prove that. You can provide reproducible builds, where someone who builds the software will end up with bit-for-bit identical binaries to the production version. Then, anyone can verify that the available binary matches the available source.
But it still looks like a centralized communication protocol that depends on proprietary servers and a private network to use. The issue with the walled gardens we're seeing (this week with this iconic photograph) is that there is no escape valve; no truly open alternative to the social network provided by these services.
With email we can (despite the difficulties) set up our own servers and clients, and communicate with anyone (again, assuming we manage to set up things correctly) who uses email today. We can even use encryption verified and trusted by many independent experts (i.e., OpenPGP). Despite all its warts, there is a safety valve there, and for now it maintains the balance between corporate and public interests.
With these chat services it seems that you are stuck with what their proprietors allow and assert.
Federation is hard to get right, but isn't it simply a base requirement for any truly free and open alternative to the WhatsApps and Snapchats of the world?
There are some creative applications that could be useful, like the models used in East Asia through micro payments. However their culture is conducive to the micropayment model (I.e. emojis, etc) whereas the West is not. A micro payment service on privatized data would be ideal if it could be profitable, yet there is no profitable model to sustain it in the West.
Edit: also, no matter what micro payment model you use, if it is successful or trends, the established free non privatized services will exploit it and provide it for free.
I can see this possibly working doing in enclaves outside the US surveillance apparatus, but directly competing against it by taking on their grandfathered companies is extremely difficult.
We don't need the masses to migrate now, it doesn't need to be either
- "everyone away from Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, everybody use only GPL and nothing for NSA, ФСБ etc to see"
or
- otherwise utter fail.
Getting people to try alternatives goes a long way. We have seen Microsoft changing massively over the last few years after Apple started eating away at the high end prosumer market for phones and laptops.
Facebook just caved after one head of a nation and a couple of newspapers, one of them in a tiny tiny country, stood up and said NO.
I, and many with me, also think the majority of the police force in most western countries is good hardworking people, (I'm personally in no position to judge eastern or African countries and even my opinion on western police is to be taken with a grain of salt) what we object to is just the warrantless dragnets etc.
And the reason why we are objecing them often isn't necessarily because we distrust our police, but as an insurance against future police and politicians, against future hackers who might get access to a raw dump, against unstable neighbouring countries and the occasional bad apple we see. Oh, and as a matter of solidarity to people like the Turkish who now seems to have reason for worry if they ever said or did anything that might have offended their (somewhat easily offended it seems) president:-|
(BTW: If you have spare time and/or cash consider supporting EFF. They seem to be very focused and reasonable to the point where they are taken seriously by politicians.)
The idea of private data atolls in the day of free services is a luxury and they are exploiting that facet. Cloud services like Gcloud, AWS, etc reflect this from their premium pricing.
I guess in general that being connected with your friends is a really useful tool, but Facebook does so much to try to keep you engaged that it becomes draining.
And yes, the more that LinkedIn tries to mirror Facebook or force engagement, the more I resent LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a lot noisier than Facebook. The notifications that I get from it are even more useless: people who you've never worked with who want to connect, people who LinkedIn feels you want to connect to but again you've never met them, ... the list goes on. Back then they also used dark patterns to make it hard to unsubscribe to their email notifications. Facebook isn't the best corporate citizen, but it's still better than LinkedIn
Except not really. Rules and moderation are censorship.
Why would you not recommend whatsapp or another encrypted system?
Hacker News is moderated but not censored in any sense that I worry about. With zero moderation you get pretty much just spambots. With bare minimum moderation you get trolls, schills, and harassers, so cohesive conversations don't happen because points can't be made in full. Hacker News is the best source I know of for news + discussion because the rules and moderation censor the noisy, unsubstantive comments that would otherwise derail an important conversation.
That said, I wish there were more forums like HN because I would like to follow the same quality of conversation that I see here on subjects besides computer science and tech companies.
Unfortunately all these activities are now simply tossed together into the general category of 'censorship' and as such we've lost the ability to clearly communicate some important distinctions in the process. I would also argue that this loss of clarity has resulted in the negative connotations of government censorship being attributed to private editorial activities with the deleterious effect that private entities are vilified for completely reasonable editorial policies.
It used to be that life happened on the streets, i. e. public property. If you get a hundred people to walk down Main Street at noon, 2/3 of the city will see it.
Over the last 50 years, life has moved (a) indoors, (b) onto private commercial property (mall, airport...) and (C) online, while some properties that used to be public are now private (parks, even the mayor's office is now often a lease-back arrangement.
That's why the rules need to be updated. Otherwise we'll be left with a Free Speech Zone(tm)(sponsored by McDonalds) on some empty parking lot for each city.
Low barriers + large numbers is at least a nudge in the direction of intellectual diversity.
All major newspapers are owned either by News Limited, a subsidiary of News Corporation, or Fairfax Media.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Australia#Newspapers_...
Good to hear newspapers still exist in the future. :)
Getting a significant amount of users is tricky of course. But that's also true for both newspapers and social networks
Now we're doing more of that kind of communication inside social networks. They can't censor preemptively so they censor after we publish. But it's not different than wanting to write to friends using a newspaper as intermediary. The reason we were not doing that was the extreme inconvenience of the method but censorship would have been the same.
What we're doing now is forcing free speech protection on some companies that became a communication medium almost indistinguishable from free air. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-...
This photo was taken by a photographer employed by a private company, then published by a private company, awarded a prize by a private organization.
Not much has changed.
Facebook just fired the last of its on-staff journalists.
Human greed.
They're all viable theories of how to structure a society, but they all fail when the people in power decide to put their own interests in front of the needs of the general populous.
Sadly, that separation falls apart far too often.
Many people are more interested in avoiding spam and abuse than they are in seeing something outrageous. As long as you have forum-shopping the more highly moderated places have an advantage, at least some of the time.
Facebook is in the moderation business. They're going to screw up sometimes but they're not going to stop moderating. On the other side you often have people saying they're not doing enough about abuse.
Not at all recently. But youtube's policies and the community's reactions to them are very much a case of "First they came for the x". Happens very regularly, and only the affected ones speak up, which is just not enough when we're talking about a web giant like google/youtube.
The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platforms that they don't own).
Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.
You've clarified here and said that in the private case there is a 'moral obligation'. Really? What exactly is the obligation? Falling back on the generic notion of 'free speech' doesn't actually clarify the argument.
For example, if I managed a public forum for discussion of roller coasters, am I 'obligated' to accept all user generated content? What if a controversial post was about labor practices at an amusement park. Perhaps that is tangently connected to 'roller coasters' but maybe I don't want my site politicized and so I moderate/delete that content. Is that some sort of ethical violation (I'm assuming for this thought exercise that my terms of service say that I'm going to moderate content, i.e. this isn't a surprise to the participants).
What if my forum is oriented around a concept, such as regulatory reform? Is there an obligation to accept and publish content that is inflammatory, off topic, superfluous, or perhaps just contrary to my goals? What guidance would help me decide when I am 'morally obligated' to publish the content?
To be clear, I think there is value in healthy debate, I just struggle with the unqualified appeals to 'free speech' to put 'moral' requirements on publishers and unfortunately I think the power of the concept of 'free speech' is often wielded in these cases to advocate for legal requirements, which I think goes way to far.
EDIT: fixed typos
It doesn't sound unreasonable to say that the more power you have to shape the world around you, the more obligation you have to use that power for the greater good. This kind of noblesse oblige is not a foreign concept to most people.
It might also make a difference if a company is actively trying to become the platform for everyone to express their thoughts. Whether or not your actions actually impede free speech or not depends a lot on whether or not there are alternatives of a comparable size and influence. For example, I have no obligation to let random people put up "TRUMP 2016" signs on my lawn, because they are free to put up signs on their own lawns, windows, cars, etc. But if all the HOAs in the city banned election signs, that could be a problem even though HOAs are not run by the city.
The closer you are to having a monopoly on deciding what people can or can't say in their daily life, the more your moral obligations will resemble that of a government. This becomes so extreme in the case of the government itself, that smart people in the past have decided to codify some of the government's moral obligations into a legally binding document.
Sounds like a problem that doesn't actually exist.
Freedom of speech is not a measure of those things, it is a concept we, in the US, exported to conform other democracies to our will, with mixed success.
It became a meme amongst private persons. And it is still a meme, virally spreading words that have no congruence with the reality the words are used in.
Freedom of speech is a limitation of the government retaliating on a person solely on the basis of their speech. It is not a limitation of private persons using the government's courts to create a consequence for someone else's speech, it is not a limitation on private persons for restricting or censoring other people's speech.
Both Twitter and Facebook were trumpeting their dedication to freedom of speech and liberty during Arab Spring.
If they had just said, "Look we have all these shareholders we have to appease with money, and right now this is the best way to make more money" I would have no problem with that.
Don't pretend to be anti-censorship and then turn around and censor things.
They are liable to offer the service in good faith. If their service to the user is communication, then I don't see how that promises any less than free speech. Publication of pornography to minors is an offense, so it's not covered by free speech to begin with. The picture in question is not pornography.
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.
Yes, absolutely. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to an audience.
Translation: if you document any of the numerous real human rights atrocities that are happening today then expect to get banned. If anything, the fact that this photo is already 'historic' and 'iconic' means that it's less important than what's being captured today.
If more people had've paid attention to this photo and its ilk, perhaps the US wouldn't have destroyed Iraq, and ISIS wouldn't be doing those atrocities of which you speak.
It's made to be porn by the context it's viewed in and by the reaction of the viewers - some people, I gather, are turned on by car crashes.
It's a harder problem than your comment seems to be suggesting.
Personally I think a blanket ban on images of full-frontal nudity of a person would be reasonable for both a public forum like Facebook and a newspaper.
To quote Justice Stewart in Jacobellis vs. Ohio:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
That must surely be a tipping point?
They set the tone when they deleted one of the most iconic news photos in history; that it got reshared by the democratically elected leader of a country (and then deleted again) was just adding enormous visibility to the tone they'd already set.
You and I wish that was the case. This is a minor concession made by Facebook that they and their apologists be able to use for years to trumpet about how their content polices are oh-so reasonable, and that they're super duper flexible and thoughtful. That those very few rare cases where they overstep are reconsidered and rolled back.
If they fix all the high-publicity cases, then it's easy to sell the idea that they're always doing the right thing. Otherwise why aren't more people complaining?
Voicing my dissatisfaction outside of a news cycle where they're in the mud gets me labeled a hater, neckbeard, out of touch, a hardliner, or any of the dozens of bog standard reasons to dismiss criticism.
I would like this to be the kind of thing I would discuss with friends, but that would require having friends. I did, once. Then Facebook happened. My comment history here, mostly just a few pages in from the top, details the whole story, if you're interested. (Sidebar: I've been thinking I should probably put together a list of links to some especially salient posts from there, in order to make it easy for people who aren't already interested to understand where I'm coming from and the nature of the problem I see. If you decide to go poking through my back numbers, perhaps you'd be so kind as also to mention whichever, if any, of those comments spoke strongly to you, so that I can be sure to include them in that list.)
In any case, what I do seems, if not necessarily to work, then generally not to fail. Here on HN, I almost always find a sympathetic ear, which I gather is pretty unusual for anyone talking about anything even remotely controversial. In real life, not everyone is interested, and that's okay. But I have noticed that, on lately less rare occasion, that people seem to take a mention of Facebook in a negative light as an opportunity to unburden themselves of their own complaints. These mostly seem to revolve around privacy concerns and platform lock-in, which is totally reasonable. That seems to be happening a bit more often lately. It's not something I really mention a lot here, on the one hand because those aren't really my stories to tell, and on the other because I also go to bars to drink, to enjoy myself and the company of others, and to remind myself that it is in fact possible to have an enjoyable social life that totally excludes Facebook. Quote-mining that wouldn't be much fun. So I don't do it.
You're right that it can be trickier to make these kinds of points outside a news cycle that includes Facebook having fucked up somebody's life again. It is far from impossible, but it does take a bit more effort and delicacy. And is it just me, or do such news cycles seem to be happening more and more often lately?
I understand your pessimism. Sometimes I feel the same. But it's important not to surrender, because to do so makes us useless, and since we refuse to help make money for it, useless is exactly what Facebook needs us to be. That by itself seems sufficient reason to me for us to be otherwise.
(Oh, and - if you actually do have a beard that extends down onto your neck, consider trimming and shaving to maintain a neat border along the underside of your jaw. Perceptions matter. If you look like Richard Stallman, people are less likely to take seriously anything you have to say. Perhaps that shouldn't be true, but it is, and we ignore the truth of the world at our peril.)
I'm not sure it should matter whether it's a Prime Minister or a 22 year old college dropout.
It seems awkward and creepy to consider all photos of nude children to be pornographic.
The vast, overwhelming majority (surely more than 99.9%, maybe more than two nines) of photos of nude children have no plausible sexual tone whatsoever.
And, similarly, I presume that many images that are indeed pornographic depict children who are clothed.
What does one have to do with the other?
For adults, I kinda understand: sex is one of the main reasons adults take their clothes off. But kids, especially young kids, run around naked all the time!
Does facebook not permit pictures of birth?
This policy is not about protecting anyone. It's about keeping up appearances. The same can be said about most policies.
1. The process worked. Facebook looked it over, reasoned about it, and changed their minds. Kudos to them for admitting a mistake.
2. It took a media uproar to make a change like this. The process is broken. There has to be a better way to make these changes.
3. There was no right objective answer in the first place, so the process is inherently political.
I am leaning towards #3. Want to know what the HN community thinks.
That photo was said by some to have been instrumental in bringing home to Americans the brutal effect of the war. It may have actually contributed to shortening the war.
Now imagine if the Vietnam war was underway right now, and that photo was taken 24 hours ago.
Would it be seen on Facebook? No way.
Their system is utterly broken.
There'd have been no way a Norwegian government at that time would have objected to censorship of an image like this, not least because everyone knew that the US would have reacted strongly, given that the most senior Nordic politician who dared speak up caused quite a stir:
When the then Minister of Education in Sweden, Olof Palme (later PM), took part in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1968, the US withdrew their ambassador from Sweden. In 1972, he as a PM compared the US bombing of Hanoi to the bombing of Guernica, and the US froze diplomatic relations with Sweden for a year as punishment.
Norway itself saw a spate of people imprisoned for refusing conscription citing Norwegian NATO membership and the US war in Vietnam (I have an uncle that was in prison for that; my dad was also imprisoned for refusing conscription in part because of the past Norwegian attitudes to the Vietnam war, though his case happened after the war had ended - it took years before the Vietnam wars effect refusing conscription subsided)
It's easy to stand up for free speech when it involves something this old. It's far harder to stand up for it when it is happening.
Consider this: what if it was the only copy of this picture? What about the smaller publishers that can't easily build media uproar? Could we ever end up with this kind of "mistakes" happening automatically thanks to AI algorithms?
They are allowed to. If they weren't allowed to, this wouldn't have happened at all.
OTOH, everyone else is allowed to criticize their particular choices, even while recognizing that they have the right to make choices.
> The only reason Facebook is a platform people choose to use is because of the editorial decisions they have been making.
I disagree that this is the only reason, but even if this was true that wouldn't be an argument against public commentary and criticism regarding Facebook's editorial decisions.
> And the problem was that the policy was too consistent?
No, the problem that has been suggested is that the policy is too simplistic, not too consistent.
The only reason FB is the "safe" place it is is because they have done an incredibly good and consistent job of getting this type of stuff done. And I don't see any way they run around policies like this without just giving special privileges to ignore the posts of more influential people.
The argument over whether it is too simplistic is already all over all the other subthreads, feel free to engage in it there; I don't feel the need to repeat what's been said elsewhere here. In GP, I was just correcting you on what the nature of the complaint is.
What I do, and what I encourage family and friends to do, is to have your own blog and post substantial writings on your blog and use social media posts to reference your blog. I still use social media for posting vacation pictures, commenting on other people's posts, and links to interesting stuff to read on the web.
I think this is a good compromise.
But how many thousands of similar cases don't find the same outrage online, but are still just as dangerous? We don't hear about those. That's the problem with censorship - most of the time you don't even know what you were supposed to be able to see, by the time it's censored.
for people like me, here a link not requiring a signup to read: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-...
This sort of exception based polciies would lead facebook into same trouble as the way they were censoring conservative news.
I don't think that will work. We're gonna have to make new laws, the social media laws.
...Never thought I'd type that! :)
It's not like anybody is forcing them to use FB or that there are no alternatives.
In many ways you don't really have a choice about what social network you use, just whether you use one at all.
It's hard to get your n(n − 1)/2 friends and family to also switch.
As much as I am disgusted by Facebook right now, they do one thing right -- they make it fairly easy to connect to friends of friends and people that are in your social circles but you don't know them yet. (A large part is the amount of data they have, along with a good friend suggestion system.)
I'm pretty much invisible on Diaspora -- there is no way I can meet new friends from my area unless I start posting a lot with tags like #cityname and #countryname, and even then it all hinges on at least somebody being on the same server -- if they are on a different one, the tagged posts will not get there.
I disagree, local proximity is not critical to maintaining a friendship. I have friends I talk with daily who live much further than 30km away, even some in other countries. A great thing about the internet is it allows people to connect over other similarities than physical location. I have some friends who I've never even met in person before, for example.
On the other hand, I've never really found facebook style physical "friend-of-a-friend" type connections to be that useful to me. Most all of my friends in meatspace are part of the same group, ie all our "friend-of-friends" are each other. The rest are people who aren't interested in introducing me to the rest of their social circle.
Now I don't think this proves anything, or even if there is any way of measuring the ease/quality of friends made on vs off line, but it's just an example from my own life. How well making friends with strangers online, strangers offline, or friends-of-friends depends heavily on your personality and current social group. The situation is a lot more variable than how you present it.
Just seems like a gigantic waste of time to me... ;-)
* My group of friends and acquaintances who play badminton coordinate on Facebook; we do not work at the same place or have each other's phone numbers. People use the number of "Going" people to figure out whether there are still slots to play or not.
* The local university feminist organization is organized 100% through Facebook. We send one email a month or so to our mailing list, but if you want to participate (help out, for instance), you do this through the closed Facebook group.
It may be easy to leave Facebook and stay in contact with your closest friends; it's hard to replace larger social groups like those above.
Often it is not, because Facebook has so successfully inveigled itself into and through people's social interactions that a lot of folks just don't think about keeping in touch any other way.
We should be trying to make it possible for people to have the very real benefits Facebook offers, without having to suffer the miseries both subtle and gross which Facebook has no reason not to inflict. I don't have a good answer yet as to how we go about doing that. But as it becomes more clear that Facebook is a problem, it becomes also more likely that someone will invent the thing which will not only kill it, but make it impossible for anything of its like to come along again.
So even if I don't have a solution, talking about the problem is still worthwhile.
Right now, using facebook isn't like choosing an email account or cellular provider.
It is more like one of the old telecoms. And unfortunately, if you move to one of the 'others', it isn't compatable with facebook. It is truly more akin to a phone company that won't connect to other companies.
Which means that switching definitely has its costs if friends, family, etc are already on the network. This is a huge advantage in Facebook's favor, and part of what makes entry into the social media realm somewhat difficult. Folks have attempted, but none have taken hold well enough to be worth the time.
Not a hopeless situation, just has challenges. I'm not sure what the answer is to solve the stuff outside of passing some sort of regulations, either protecting speech to a point and/or demanding cross-communication so choice seems reasonable.
Maybe I'm weird but my larger social groups are usually focused on specific things and I'm happy to interact with them in a forum designed specifically for that purpose, not owned by a huge information-sucking company.
In fact, I find the requirement to be a member of Facebook as a condition of productively working with that feminist org to be really exclusionary.
I'd disagree with the amount of unrelated opinion on the wire services, though - new shows never did anything like Twitter-level opinion with their Associated Press feed, for example.
That's usually a decent approach, and in most cases it doesn't cause an uproar. In the few cases where it does, the hot potato gets tossed up the chain of command until someone reverses the decision.
Or, as others have mentioned, the deletion was triggered automatically when the image was flagged by too many people. I sympathize with the deletion algorithm here. If I slave over a hot CPU all day just trying to do my job, the last thing I want to do is get sent to /dev/null because I failed to delete an image that really was inappropriate.
Why?
Employees saw this thread on Hacker News, posted on Facebook's meme network, the meme got a thousand upvotes, and someone did a one-off to reverse this decision.
Because it was obvious to everyone that it was the wrong decision. It was also probably obvious to everyone that the mistake that lead to this decision will keep happening.