Facebook apologises for removing breast cancer awareness video
bbc.com
bbc.com
Facebook needs to literally grow up, removing porn is one thing but clinical images, mothers feeding their children and such should not even be up for discussion.
It's a fine line between protecting your users from seeing offensive content and outright censorship, good to see them doing the right thing in this case, pity it is still on a 'case-by-case' basis instead of a healthy review of their policies.
The main criterion seems to be 'is the internet raising a large enough stink'? If yes then restore the image.
That's the same criterion for taking things down though.
In the worst case, it's their NSFW algorithms identifying a nipple in the picture, with no regard for context.
If you are on facebook, you are logged into facebook, and they track every click.
Unlike the poster whose content is taken down, the reporters do not become part of public record. (I am not saying that they should.)
I wonder if seeing breast feeding triggers a fundamental paradox in us humans. Seeing as how we're the only primates who have boobs even when not breast feeding. Originally boobs meant that this femal is not available for sex. In humans it means that she is very available BUT ALSO that she isn't.
This is confusing and this conflict causes discomfort.
So you would be "uncomfortable" having a female coworker that was using a breast pump? No wonder this industry has such a gender problem!
I wouldn't say anything, obviously, but I definitely wouldn't be as comfortable with it as I would, say, a sneeze.
I'm sure my female coworkers wouldn't mind vigorous nutsack scratching out in the open for all to see would they? It also is a perfectly natural activity and often necessary.
But hey, I also get annoyed at people who chew loudly.
The dilemma boils down to: people often find people's bodily functions discomforting. Where is the line for propriety? We somewhat allow nose picking. We don't like butt scratching. Occasional burps are fine, loud farts are wrong. Pooping anywhere but the toilet is gross, peeing on the side of the road is sometimes okay. Eating in publi is fine, chewing with your mouth open is not. Somewhere on this spectrum is breast feeding and breast pumps.
As for you scratching yourself: that is not something for which there are no alternative options, however, breastfeeding a newborn happens frequently and has to happen when it does and no amount of discomfort on your end will change the fact that it is as normal as you eating a sandwich or drinking a glass of milk.
If a woman is doing it 'in an open office for everyone to see' it may mean that your society is more accepting than you think, or that no more suitable alternative was available. If the lady is comfortable with it and you're not you could simply ignore them?
I'm not sure if any woman would ever want to pump openly in the office.
If it was more widely accepted and there was less fear for making coworkers uncomfortable, I believe most women would surely prefer to pump at their desk while they work instead of having to sit in a bathroom stall.
Speaking from my own limited experience, my wife finds the whole process of pumping at work uncomfortable, regardless of what her coworkers might feel.
Having to carry dirty breast shields to the sink to clean, having to hold the bottles up to her (exposed) breasts (pump bras don't work for her), the fact that she may leak, the sound the pump makes etc.
> I believe most women would surely prefer to pump at their desk while they work instead of having to sit in a bathroom stall.
Forcing mothers to use a bathroom stall just seems cruel. In Seattle, it's now building code that office buildings provide a "wellness" room for mothers returning to work.
My wife's office turned an old supply closet into such a room, but it was pretty bad, and guys were using it to take naps (they would leave when she knocked on the door--but still what a shitty thing to deal with).
Once Corp HR found out about it, they got a different room that is a bit nicer, and installed a lock requiring a key. Even still, she will prefer to come home and pump.
It's the law in Illinois that employers must provide such a place, and it cannot be a bathroom stall.
Which is what I would do. Politely ignore it.
And that means I'm uncomfortable. I don't tend to politely ignore things that I am comfortable with.
That said, I think we're missing the point. Why is the mum of a newborn in the office in the first place? She should be enjoying her many weeks (52 would be great) of paid maternity leave. And society should not penalize her for it, of course. That's the problem we should solve, not whether pumping/feeding at the office is polite or not.
And ? You're an adult and should gather the knowledge of personally dealing with discomfort. The world isn't a liberal arts college campus.
I never said anything more than looking at breastfeeding/pumping makes me uncomfortable. I did childishly compare it to other bodily functions but hey, it's a bodily function.
Facebook isn't your country.
Does this mean that there should be no pictures of women on Facebook?
Depending on who you ask, it's either because of some hand-waved nonsense about public safety, or because liberal Western values include telling women what they can and cannot wear.
Which countries?
So: none.
Besides that, we're not talking about porn. Unless you want to see breast cancer videos and mothers feeding their children as porn but that would be a perception error, the label simply does not apply.
Of course we are not talking about porn, but drawing lines in the sand is a murky business.
That can't be right.
Just look at this video, and see how ridiculous it is that Facebook had an automated tool that would take that down:
The implementation that would successfully distinguish between the two is one that doesn't. It would allow both, and not apologise for it.
Naked female brests are not porn.
The Vietnam photo censorship was met with quite a bit of confusion since I think most folks misremember it being our high school history book.
I'm starting to think that one group who keeps calling the FCC over TV shows is alive and well online.
Heck, I wonder if we polled on it, how many think MTV's response was the bigger problem.
1) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/2005-01-20-bowl-cover_x... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime-sh...
2) I'll save my commentary on them for another time
And for men to get around topless in solidarity.
In other words: I'd say there were an order of more millions of people amused about the outcome.
Now here's the thing: Mocking other people's morality isn't going to help here, I understand that. Giggling has no place in this debate.
But .. we're talking in a specific context here. Facebook. The company that wants to impersonate The Internet™. If they adopt the morality of their home country, then their rules are going to be absolutely insane in the rest of the world.
Morality isn't being defined by Facebook, nor by the US. It's a personal choice. And while 'no pornography' is an understandable business choice, 'breasts are the devil' or 'let us pretend that no human has nipples' is somewhere between hilarious and stupid if you extend that beyond a certain demographic.
For one thing you can't really compare an act that's purely entertainment to a video that could theoretically save someone's life. It just doesn't have as much value.
Secondly, what Jackson did is against the law, which wasn't the case for the FB video. Public airwaves and all that.
And lastly, if you think that was an accident I have a bridge to sell you.
I agree about the adult filters. Companies like Facebook, youtube, and Twitter can't hire people to look at every single video. They don't have the margins.
But people are offended by seeing clinical images of nudity, mother feeding their babies, etc. And Facebook wants to placate all of their users so nobody has a reason to leave.
Of course, they can't please everyone, but they'd rather make a fool of themselves before they'd become a more morally/socially opinionated corporation like Starbucks.
I've yet to meet someone like that. Are you offended by any of this? Is anybody else on HN offended by such images?
"Hide this post"
I'll take honest answers and snarky ones as well, provided the snarky ones come with a genuine laugh because with this DDoS going on this morning I could REALLY use a chuckle right now..
I think that FB is inside a fear bubble of its own making. They have to apologize too much lately and this hints to something wrong in their vetting process. Maybe too much imperfect AI or too much imperfect human judgements.
This isn't about what they can or can't do, it's about what they should or shouldn't do.
The benefits of breast cancer awareness information outweigh any imaginable harm. If you don't want to see it, then you certainly don't have to.
Why can't people let Facebook know what should and shouldn't be filtered?
Facebook already have policy that breasts are ok when they're raising awareness of breast cancer or being used to feed children, so facebook is ignoring their own existing policy.
No. We need to reject this ideology. It is wrong wrong wrong.
We need to stop perpetuating this lie.
Naked human bodies are wholey unremarkable in the strongest sense.
Why wouldn't I? You assume I'm some sort of prude?
They'd fit right in with everything else in my feed that my friends post and I don't care about.
I mean, every time you see a male dog there's a penis getting about with it, we don't seem to mind those.
Probably because dogs haven't had the Church tell them their bodies are shameful for a thousand years.
That said, I'm not convinced that sexuality on its own is damaging either. I'm not sure if you implied that with the second half of your statement/the nudity vs sexual distinction.
This way, even if they mis-categorize a medical image it won't be banned, just not widely disseminated.
They reviewed their policies over a year ago and images of breasts are allowed if they're breastfeeding, or after mastectomy (either reconstructed or tattooed or just left) or raising awareness.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/16/breastfeeding-fac...
https://www.facebook.com/help/340974655932193
https://www.facebook.com/help/318612434939348?helpref=search
What you see here are people reporting images, and facebook algos / employees mistakenly banning.
There is no picture of naked female breasts (breats only) that can be argued to be pornographic.
To call naked female breasts "porn" is to perpetuate female subjugation and body-shaming.
2. As someone who works in abuse, defining porn is really nuanced. You don't get to define porn for yourself, and while I actually do agree with where you stand on cultural norms in general, when it comes to offering public services you actually have to just go with what people find acceptable per country / comply with laws. So in some countries what would be called porn isn't considered that in others (topless women in Europe, or bikini-clad women in USA).
You can argue that all countries shouldn't body shame women or set rules for what they can and cannot wear / especially with double standards vis a vis men. (And I personally hold that view too.) But that's a societal issue / opinion and not related to having to define service behavior, which exists in society and has to comply with its whims.
We need to stop calling naked female breasts "porn".
For the simple reason that, well ... they're fucking not.
How the fuck can the naked humam body be offensive. Since it's a purely historico-religious ideology, it equates to "God made a mistake".
What nonsense.
It appears that Facebook never argued that the image was in breach of its policies. Just that some software it runs had a bug that miss classified this image.
Then when challenged they apologized and approved the add.
So to me the summary appears to be "Software company has bug that effected one customer, apologies and fixes the issue" which must happen every hour of every day...
Am I missing something?....
I'm really tired of people engaging in pointless signaling campaigns and expecting to get points for being So Brave in the face of ~ universal consensus that they are correct, or taking minor bureaucratic snafus like this as evidence that they are somehow not in a position of complete victory.
Facebook is trying to automate the detection of illegal/unwanted images, and it seems extremely difficult to detect the context of the image to the extent that you can differentiate between acceptable images of human bodies, and unacceptable images (which would be, I assume, the vast, vast majority of such images posted).
I wonder how they could proceed with this- maybe with some sort of anomaly detection, where you do a first pass to detect all images containing the unwanted features (e.g. naked bodies), and then a second pass to try and detect the activity that's going on, or to detect if the image is famous (e.g. a picture of David, the famous Italian statue, would be acceptable, while a photo of a naked man in the same position would presumably not be).
[1] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/09/12/sheryl-sandberg-respon...
But it bothers me that we leave so much of our discourse to such imperfect systems.
I'm not aware of Facebook suppressing the Prager University videos.
And in the YouTube case, it's likely an automated response to (mis)flagging by users who politically differ.
Have one single clear principle and apply is consistently. Change the principle don't make exceptions if needed. "Educational videos wont be removed" could have been a good policy that Google has had for Youtube.
Or even "No Breasts"can be a good policy too. If you want to show breast cancer videos do it on you tube, shoot it with a prop or link to another page. I dont see why that does not work.