Sometimes, the point is to make us uncomfortable. Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of the Norway’s largest newspaper, shared a post containing an iconic Vietnam War photograph only soon to be removed due to Facebook’s censorship.
The saga started when reporter Tom Egeland shared a post last month that included a famous 1972 photo by Nick Ut, in which terrified Vietnamese children flee napalm bombs. [1] One of them is a naked 9-year-old girl who is screaming in terror and pain and Facebook deleted the post because it contained child nudity. [2] Not surprisingly, Facebook also censored a number of Norweigian official, including prime minister Erna Solberg, who shared the photo on their pages. After intense criticism from media and Norwegian politicians, Facebook backed down Friday afternoon and said it would allow the photo to appear on the social network.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults ? 62 percent ? get their news from social media, according to a recent Pew study. [3] Social media giants like Facebook thus has unprecedented control over what people sees and why. Therefore, Facebook must be held accountable for the information distributed on its platform despite its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on Facebook being a tech company instead of a media company. In his open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Hansen argued that media “have an important task in bringing information, even including pictures, which sometimes may be unpleasant, and which the ruling elite and maybe even ordinary citizens cannot bear to see or hear, but which might be important precisely for that reason.” [4]
Initially defending its decision, Facebook said it could not make exceptions for child nudity, regardless of the photo’s significance. Hansen wrote in his letter that “would you once again intercept the documentation of cruelties, just because a tiny minority might possibly be offended by images of naked children, or because a pedophile person somewhere might see the picture as pornography?” [5] Later on Friday, Facebook announced that it would reinstated the image Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal. [6]
However, things remained to be seen as how the soclal media giant will adjust its review mechanism to permit sharing of the images. As Hansen continued in his open letter to Facebook, “This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California.” [7]
[1] Ryan Grenoble, It Took Facebook 2 Weeks To Figure Out The Difference Between War Photography And Kiddie Porn, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-censorship-vietnam-photo-norwegianpaper_us_57d2c6b6e4b06a74c9f42fdb?section=us_technology
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Grenoble, supra on Sept. 9, 2016.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.