Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
If you want completely free speech then pay for a website and post all the pictures you want, but to waste your time protesting the rights of a company to say "I don't like these pictures on our servers and brand" is just a ridiculous waste of energy. They have rights just as much as you do but there is no reason they should bend to the will of a small majority of people who are mixing personal pictures with very public ones or who post pictures for shock effect or even out of sheer ignorance.
Just because someone has a right to do something doesn’t mean you can’t criticize her or him for doing it.
(This mistake is made so often. Frequently after someone is criticized some idiot will point to freedom of speech or similar such nonsense. That’s not how it works. That’s pretty much the opposite of freedom of speech, some sort of bizarro freedom of speech. Freedom of speech – or any other freedom – does not imply freedom from criticism. Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right. Oh, and also, just because I think it’s not right doesn’t mean I want to make it illegal.)
Many people do not view feeding a child as a private thing.
They think it should be no different than posting a picture of you eating a sandwich. It is important to advance their goal of being able publicly feed a child by making images of that as ho hum as images of you eating a sandwich. To do this, they must put things on facebook.
Facebook can censor their images if they want to, but they'll apparently get protesting mothers in front of their building if they think it that important.
In order for more women to choose to breastfeeding over formula feeding it needs to become normalised again. In order to normalise breastfeeding people have to be exposed to it more so that it is not weird and so that they are not shocked by it. It should not be a private thing, it should be a sociable thing like it is in many other countries around the world.
They don't remove pictures of women flashing all of their cleavage or prancing around in pants with their hands over their boobs. THAT is offensive (and slightly slutty). Breastfeeding is definetely not.
Breastfeeders are angry because they feel that by banning images of breastfeeding women (most of which don't even feature nipples) facebook is communicating the wrong moral messages. As facebook has such a large impact on society, it is very important that they play their part in helping to promote breastfeeding, and not making it seem an offensive & disgusting thing that should be censored. If facebook was run by mums and not adolescent boys then this wouldn't be happening.
Why do you need to post these pictures? It's not that I find these pictures offensive, but the odd time I see somebody breastfeeding in public, I do catch myself being slightly thrown off. It seems like a very private thing. Why do you WANT to post these pictures online?
I'm torn on the subject. There's plenty of normal, natural things that still should be private, but is nurturing our children one of them?
That's because it is natural.
Where do we draw the line? Am I aloud to post pictures of myself urinating? Because that's natural too.
Natural != appropriate to show the public.
It's confounded by the multiple definitions of natural: here it just means commonplace and ordinary.
There is a public interest at work here. Breastfed babies are said to have fewer short and long term medical issues. Breastfeeding might be as important to our health (and crippling healthcare costs) as a people as bike paths, sidewalks, healthy foods, preventative medical visits, and any of the other many small lifestyle improvements which we are willing to spend many millions of dollars creating and promoting. And it costs us...a worldview adjusted ever-so-slightly back to what has been for most of our species' history perfect normalcy.
This is an important issue. Encouraging breastfeeding, which does appear to be the superior form of infant nutrition, requires that we normalize it. If we're all too delicate to see tiny thumbnails of women breastfeeding floating by in our newsfeeds, how will anybody ever survive the rather more "graphic" occurrence of it happening next to them on the bus?
I'm willing to accept bikers in far-too-revealing spandex. I have similarly learned to accept women breastfeeding. it's really not so bad once you actually encounter it...which is not something you'll ever know if you're being shielded from it by "decency" filters like Facebook's, or hearing the implied judgment that it's indecent.
Probably for the same reasons someone would want to post any picture online.
Now imagine that what Facebook has decided to censor is not just some hobby of interest mainly to you, but a cause about which you care passionately and which profoundly affects every single member of every generation. It's a legitimate "think of the children!" situation.
I don't mind Bill Gates working to eradicate malaria, just don't let him post pictures of filthy people in attire Westerners would consider improper. Ewww.
Breastfeeding is coming back, and children are reaping the health benefits, precisely because concerned women have been dragging our culture back from its neurotic denial of it for over half a century now. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Leche_League.
Yeah, I may find it annoying if Facebook disapproves of any activity I'd like to publicize to the world, but thankfully, we've got tumblr and other sites where we can post photos of us doing (almost) whatever the hell we want. I'd just go to tumblr (Note: I am in no way affiliated with tumblr, nor do I have a tumblr blog, or a Facebook account for that matter).
I take absolutely no part in the argument, and all I'm saying (for the last time) is: the way this protest is expressed, its origin and its target are interesting.
I don't think either side is idiotic. I believe Facebook has a real need to improve its system so that it doesn't have to hold the entire world to a single parochial standard of propriety. And these women are encouraging it to do so. The only measure of their approach that matters to them is whether it is effective. Time will tell.
What would be interesting to me is your proposal for a better way to achieve their goals, and why you believe it would be more effective.
But I'm really not looking for solutions. Just enjoing the moment when "in 2012 an idealist group of women took to the streets of the Western world in anger, with bare breasts and suckling babies in their arms to protest the actions of 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who runs a large, popular communication/vicarious-living/ego-stroking/stalking website (or 'virtual social networks' as they were called) to demand of him to allow them to publish photographs of them breastfeeding their newborns."
Would you like to eat in bathrooms? In tiny little closets? Under a blanket in the dark? These are all places baby feeding alarmests try to make babies eat.
How would you feel if any picture that had a bit of a plate in it was censored off facebook because a group of mostly childless and old men found it offensive?
Think about changing your atitude. Just because you're not used to seeing something doesn't mean the issue is with where it's happening, perhaps you're just not used to it.
Think about it: people are now protesting a (non-democratic) corporation for their social rights.
And another thing. This is the internet age, and people insisting on posting their photos in whatever compromising positions for the world to see should be at least somewhat technologically savvy. Why don't they just post their photos on tumblr (with a link on facebook) where they can even post photos of them having sex with their (non-minor) children?
When governments ruled the world it was hard to pick up your things and leave. But in the age of the nanny-conglomerates, why not just go to a competitor? I guess the answer is that the market isn't really competitive any more. Rather, it's become (just like in the archaic state-ruled world) segmented into influence blocs. You got a few superpowers, and lots of satellite "states".
If they had just silently stopped using Facebook, there's no chance that any change they wanted would occur. That would be idiotic.
What seems idiotic about the "pictures of breastfeeding infants should be allowed on Facebook" side?
(The fact that they don't give up on Facebook and use something else? But their goal isn't just to be able to post their pictures somewhere; they want to be able to participate in Facebook, where for good or ill much of the world's social life happens these days, without censoring themselves in pointless ways; and they want everyone on Facebook to have that freedom. Saying they should go elsewhere instead of protesting at Facebook would be, on a much smaller scale, a bit like saying that people unhappy with their country's government should emigrate rather than protesting at their government.)
We have women who like publishing photographs of them breastfeeding their babies, and we have a corporation that thinks some people are offended by said photographs, so they take them down. The women insist on their right to publish said photographs on the very same website owned by the aforementioned corporation, so they stage a public protest.
I find it entertaining, but I mostly think it is a nice cultural moment in the history of the West. But it is by no means a big deal.
The issue is that "Facebook users don't accept me breastfeeding in public."
Facebook users, not Facebook.
Idiotic is a strong word because these types of protests are common enough that this issue gets more exposure than just to Facebook execs, but it could be a losing battle unless the mainstream Facebook user backs them.
I wonder whether this protest will have the desired effect. Banning topless and breastfeeding photos leading to topless women descending on FBHQ might not be the stick the protesters are hoping for.
Personally I suspect this to be mainly a USA issue born out of the promotion of women's bodies as sexual objects.
Death is normal part of society, but no sane person will consider posting pictures of decomposing bodies acceptable. (Another hyperbole).
This was the point someone else tried to make (see my other comment).
You've cut the proposition in half.
Yes death is a normal (and natural) part of society. Presenting decomposing bodies in public is not generally considered a normal part of civilised society (sky burials aside I guess; though they have their own context). It's that 'a baby feeding in public' is normal. The equivalent is that 'a dead body in a morgue' or 'a dead body in a coffin' is normal.
My point is that Facebook, which is not (or hardly) subject to any governmental regulation, has become the focus of such a statement.
And it's not the first time. The USA used to have rules governing how much of an area's media channels could be owned by a single corporation (and thus warped to serve a single set of interests.) There are strong parallels to this situation.
One of the effects of these Too Big/Entrenched To Replace corporations. It is often easier and more effective to change the corporations than to use alternatives, and in many cases, there simply are no viable alternatives.
The people on HN probably care more about having an open web that enables free-as-in-breastfeeding-pictures communication than it does about breastfeeding. One can choose to view this controversy in either context; I care about both, somewhat to my surprise.
(Actually, much of HN appears to care more about "you know what's cool? a hundred billion dollars" than open communication, but that's a different story.)
I think HN-ers don't expect "free-as-in-breastfeeding-pictures" (really liked that) from a company whose business is selling your personal information to advertisers.
People getting shot in the face or being thrown off the roof of a skyscraper is just wholesome fun for the whole family, though.
edit: I didn't mean this to be just snippy. My point is that the discussion is here, not on his own blog, and he wants to have his opinion heard, so he posts here, not on thingsithinkaboutbreastfeedingpicsonfacebook.com.