Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On 'Napalm Girl' Photo: 'We Don't Always Get it Right' (theguardian.com) 196
Facebook will learn from a mistake it made by deleting a historic Vietnam war photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, said Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer. The photograph was removed from several accounts on Friday, including that of the Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, on the grounds that it violated Facebook's restrictions on nudity. It was reinstated after Solberg accused Facebook of censorship and of editing history, The Guardian reports. From the article:"These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right," Sandberg wrote in a letter to the prime minister, obtained by Reuters on Monday under Norway's freedom of information rules. "Even with clear standards, screening millions of posts on a case-by-case basis every week is challenging," Sandberg wrote. "Nonetheless, we intend to do better. We are committed to listening to our community and evolving. Thank you for helping us get this right," she wrote. She said the letter was a sign of "how seriously we take this matter and how we are handling it."
Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously-- You got caught red handed being censorship loving fuckwits who refuse to accept community feedback on policy decisions, naturally, you got your asses handed to you over it, and now you want to cuddle back into good graces so you can once again start dishing out your authoritarian horseshit once this blows over.
Fuck you.
(and for the people with the usual "Their service, their rules!" attitudes, fuck you idiots too. Facebook has maneuvered itself as a major gatekeeper between the press and their readers. That is what caused this whole censorship issue to explode like this in the first place. Once you start acting like a monopoly, or at least the major stake holder for a necessary position for society, you stop being allowed to have authoritarian control, and need to be more civically minded.)
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't use FB... problems solved.
FB is far from a monopoly and they are not a charity. They are a for-profit company and they can run their company any way that they see fit. If you don't like it, vote with your feet and uninstall the app, delete your account and walk away. If enough people do this, then FB will not have the power it has now. FB is only as powerful as your make it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't use FB... problems solved.
FB is far from a monopoly and they are not a charity.
FB has just shy on 24% of the entire Earth's human population connected to it. Do you want revisit your idea that that they are not a gatekeeper in social media?
For comparison, twitter only has accounts for about 4.3% of the Earths population.
Re: (Score:2)
That said... am I really going to lack for knowledge of certain historical photos or current events even if FB does censor them? I knew of that particular picture for decades before FB came out. The reason is that it was plastered all over the place in journalism, in art and even was in one or two music videos that I can recall. Not to mention, you know, history books.
I agree that they tend to box you into your own little echo chamber if you let them, but I am frequently annoyed and even somewhat offende
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
You say you knew about the picture for decades before Facebook existed. That's great. That's how we learned about things BACK THEN.
The world has changed. You may not like it, I certainly don't like it, but when a sizable portion of the population only really visits Facebook and relies on Facebook for news, events, all that sort of stuff, ANY kind of censorship is getting dangerously close to revisionism.
There is not much difference between the main source of information, be it BREAKING NEWS! or cat videos, saying "There was no naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack" or saying "There was no protesting student run over by a tank on Tiananmen Square".
Be very careful what you allow.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that they tend to box you into your own little echo chamber if you let them, but I am frequently annoyed and even somewhat offended by what people sometimes post on my FB.
Then don't let people post on your FB. Even though the principle is no different then sending you offending letters, on FB I believe you can at least block people from posting on your page.
But in principle: you don't get it, do you? This is not about recognizing that this is a historic picture, this is about the fact that if this was a current newspicture, it would be censored by Facebook. Facebook would ignore it, deny it, say this never happened. And therefore American attacts on Vietnamese villages neve
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.google.com/trends/... [google.com]
Granted, some of that downwards trend might be due to people using the native app instead. However, so far, there are no examples of social networks with a double peak. They go up, and they come down. Facebook is bigger, but not a special snowflake in that regard. It will fade.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In some jusrisdictions it's almost two.
Except you have to drive down the same streets as those who do, and be governed by the same politicians elected by those who do...
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
These days when I go down to the public square to stand on my soap box and make my voice heard, the public square is empty.
The public, which used to mostly be reachable via the public sphere, has all moved into spaces which are privately owned and publicly accessible for commerce, but not publicly accessible for free speech.
This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.
Re: (Score:2)
Exhibit A: I give you Trump vs Clinton. Don't look at the speech issuing forth from the fans of either side and tell me they deserve something different.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.
This is the disturbing natural of reality -- or perhaps SURreality? -- these days.
I remember suffering through reading Jean Baudrillard's [wikipedia.org] musings about "simulacra" decades ago, when he famously published a set of essays including "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" [wikipedia.org]. Of course, Baudrillard understood that the war DID take place, but he argued that the media portrayals and 24-hour news cycle that emerged had created an almost separate reality.
Long before "The Matrix," Baudrillard talked about constructed reality and its ability to deceive and to woo humanity into complacency. But of course he is a horrendous writer and has rightly been ridiculed for willfully obscure nonsense, and at the time I dismissed what little sense I found as po-mo BS.
Alas, now it feels it has all come to pass, and I think of good ole Baudrillard with each year's new trends into the depths of the simulacrum. Encyclopedias and reference works have ceded their authority to wikiality and truthiness, a la Stephen Colbert. Investigative journalism has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter posts. Most people live within the simulacrum, rarely bothering to try to dig deeper and see whether all of this mediated experience actually corresponds to the real world.
And now we've delegated the authority once possessed by CNN and such to the mob of folks on Facebook. In some cases, this has undoubtedly been a good thing -- bringing a fresh democratic voice to things the "old" media would have never bothered with. But it's also a huge problem, since basic quality vetting, fact-checking, etc. are rarely done by the mob before they retweet, like, and repost.
But that's the "reality" we live in now. Rather depressing. It would not surprise me one bit if this led to a new "dark age" as facts become less important than "likes."
Re: (Score:2)
Before the internet it was TV and radio, which are heavily controlled and content restricted in most places. Before that it was newspapers, content decided by the editor/owner. Before that you had to compete with the other people on their soap boxes in the square, and if there were too many the police would tell you to come back tomorrow.
No one owes you a platform.
Re: (Score:3)
TV & Radio were heavily regulated and we even had the Fairness Doctrine which *required* media companies to broadcast contrasting viewpoints. In the Fairness Doctrine era, the vast majority of top 25 TV markets had maybe 5 commercial television stations.
So even though the television stations played games with timeslots and formats, they did give up air time to competing views, and it's kind of astonishing to think that in a given broadcast area a competing view being aired on one station literally rep
Re: (Score:2)
That was a reaction to earlier deliberately biased material like the Hearst newspapers. Fox tries to do something similar but the scale is vastly different - Murdoch doesn't seem to have ever had anyone framed or beaten up while Hearst had a reputation
Re: (Score:2)
When you say "competing view", you mean "mainstream competing view", for the most part. We are far better off with the internet in that respect. I doubt things like the "manosphere" would exist if it was down to TV to air those views. Aside from not being mainstream, it would have been balanced by opposing views and thus unable to breed in an echo chamber like it does now.
If you want the fairness doctorin for YouTube and Facebook just say so. What we have now is better though.
Re: (Score:2)
Democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others
Correction - Missed a "don't" (Score:2)
Pretending that the "sheep" who want a fair system for all don't come in massive flocks and pretending that the wolves are not as rare as they are.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Don't use FB... problems solved.
Because everything is just that simple. Never give feedback, never take feedback, and if you don't like the color of their webpages, go away.
The problem with your simplistic view of life is that people often actually like feedback.
And when we get to altering historic photographs, it gets a little into the area of politics.
Part of the horror of that photograph is that a little kid gets napalmed, her clothes burnt off, and someone is worried that some folks want to fuck her. That's sick on so many l
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Don't use FB... problems solved.
Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
If FecesBook does dumb shit like censorship then according to your "solution" they would never get feedback on their stupid policy since apparently everyone would stop using it. Let's pretend that you're right and that everyone left FB. All you've done is moved the goal post. With the _next_ social platform everyone eventually would have the _exact_ same problem.
The line must be drawn somewhere, eventually.
Or as the colloquia
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but in this case, it was manually removed by a FB drone after being flagged by another user as inappropriate.
Which is fine. The drone, just like the algorithm, is just doing their pre-programmed job.
Re: (Score:2)
"In his open letter, Hansen points out that the types of decision Facebook makes about what kind of content is promoted, tolerated, or banned – whether it makes those decisions algorithmically or not – are functionally editorial.
“The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case,” he wrote. “This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in Cal
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
In which case, the appropriate action for Facebook to take is to have a human review the image once the poster disputes the takedown, and to act sensibly, rationally, and in a Kong authoritarian manner.
You know, NOT telling the journalist that the image is infringing without any room to contest. NOT taking down not only the journalist's open letter about the improper takedown, and NOT deleting the PRIME MINISTER'S post about it, while pretending that doing those things is all hunky dory.
You know, NOT the way Facebook chose to handle this, and now is trying hard to soon its way out of being caught red handed doing, and publicly shamed for.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OK, then make them criminally liable for criminal posts. They shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Either they don't censor, or they are liable for posted content. Since they are clearly censoring, they should be liable. Since the aren't being properly prosecuted, harsh public criticism is a lot less than they deserve.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a lot simpler than that they are "censorship loving fuckwits", they're a private company trying to make money. You don't make money if you need an f...ing lawyer to check for rules and exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions and any applicable precedents as to whether or not a particular post is permitted. It used to be as simple as no nudity, not because there's anything wrong with tits and ass but that's not what it's about. Then they started having issues because people posted about brea
Re:Cut the bullshit, facebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a problem with your argument:
The censorship did not stop at just the image. A public open letter to Facebook about this issue by a freaking prime minister was deleted.
Censorship. The real deal.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a problem with your argument: The censorship did not stop at just the image. A public open letter to Facebook about this issue by a freaking prime minister was deleted.
No, it stopped at the image as the public open letter attached the same uncensored image saying Facebook is wrong to censor this photo. Facebook removed that post, she reposted it with a censored image. I have Norwegian sources to back that up if that got lost in translation. It's part of the problem of complaining about Facebook on Facebook, showing what's being removed as a violation of the guidelines is in itself a violation of the guidelines.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes ac, exactly like that, because this:
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
Totally never happened, and any post that might have been deleted was certainly not really from the prime minister of Norway.
Obviously.
(Idiot.)
Re: (Score:2)
And clearly necons only understand the concepts of Easements and right of way when they directly translate into personal profit, and not when used for the originally prescribed purposes of furthering the public good.
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like along winded way to say that no company of any size could have culpability because they're all just doing their job trying to make money. The people affected by such actions are too simple to understand the nuance of why things occur.
There is a fine line between making money and being a corporate sociopath.
(And now for the record, you can find a naked 9yo on Facebook.) Correction you can find an iconic portrait of a 9 YEAR old who had just been napalmed and spent the next 17 months in a
Re: (Score:2)
Parsing the text accompanying the image is easy for an algorithm. Much harder than identifying a naked female minor.
Re: (Score:2)
The 1st amendment is very simple. It does not say that you should have endless free speech, it just said that Congress can't pass any laws limiting speech. Nothing about a town passing a noise by-law (something that seems fine as long as it treats everyone the same). Nothing about the courts not being able to limit speech, at a time when many things were illegal even without statutes being passed. Serious threats, slander, libel, fraud, perjury were all illegal under the common law and didn't need Congress
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A situation that Facebook, in its majority stakeholder position, does precisely nothing to correct, and instead gives complicit support for.
I definitely will blame them for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Once you start acting like a monopoly, or at least the major stake holder for a necessary position for society, you stop being allowed to have authoritarian control, and need to be more civically minded.
"Need to" and "legally required to" are two different things, or is there some law you're aware of enforcing this principle? Any jurisdiction will do.
Re: (Score:2)
Does law of the jungle count?
When you make your customers leave, you don't get money, and you die.
Facebook is aware of this, but does not wish to change its behavior. That is why it is smearing pablum all over this issue, and trying to kiss and make up, cheater style. (Cause they really love you. Honest.)
Re: (Score:2)
The argument is about whether they should be criticized, not about whether their actions were legal. If you want to talk about legal, then you need to consider "under the laws of which country". And would it be proper for a country to ban Facebook for doing this in favor of a local company which refrained? If not, why not?
You don't get into such things if you are just considering whether they should be criticized, and I feel that they should be severely and repeatedly criticized. I'd be willing to consi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's not quite true. What *is* true is that there are certain things that they have all decided to "de-emphasize". Whether they decided independently or in collusion is something we don't know, but the effect is about the same. OTOH, there are areas where they disagree, also. And the truth of the material seems to be of only minor concern.
If you think "Gamergate" was a major incident in this area, you need to open your eyes. Most of it is more power or money oriented. (And there are reasons why many
Re: (Score:2)
Wait.. Twitter makes money?
Easy solution for you Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No, but they are the arbiter of their own service. (You are not.)
They are also forbidden by law from hosting child pornography.
Re: (Score:2)
They are forbidden (with rather strict penalties) from hosting child pornography. In their situation it's better to block such
No, censorship takes practice like any other skill (Score:2)
"Getting it right" depends on what they're trying to get right. TheIntercept.com tells us "Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored [theintercept.com]" and Glenn Greenwald told us about these problems before as did Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen before Greenwald (the latter two rightly calling Facebook "a monstrous surveillance engine" and the like). As Moglen points out in every one of his speeches in the past few years (if not longer) that "Stallman was right". But back to
Phan Th Kim Phúc (Score:5, Informative)
In case anyone wonders what happened to her, Phan Th Kim Phúc (the girl in the photo) survived the napalm attack, albeit with injuries. She is now a Canadian citizen, living in Ajax, Ontario with her husband and two children. In 2015 she began getting laser treatments for her burn scars in Miami.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder. If she had an issue with the photo and requested that FB take it down, would that be a different story?
This is hypothetical, of course.
Her name is Kim Phuc and she now lives in Canada (Score:3, Informative)
Her name is Kim Phuc and she now lives in Canada. She was fleeing a napalm strike by the South Vietnamese Air Force.
How the Vietnam War's 'Napalm Girl' Is Finally Getting Her Scars Treated – 43 Years Later [people.com]
The girl in the picture: Kim Phuc's journey from war to forgiveness [cnn.com]
'Napalm Girl': An Iconic Image Of War Turns 40 [npr.org]
The Kim Foundation International [kimfoundation.com]
Why is this even an issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
.
If there is a problem, it is those people who mistake Facebook for journalism or integrity.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why is this even an issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Once Facebook took the plunge into editing/publishing and curating the news, everything you just said went out the window.
Re: (Score:2)
When a quarter of the planet's population gather in the same place, are you really trying to claim it's not a public place?
Tagging based solution (Score:4, Funny)
There needs to be acceptable nudity policies. These should require users who upload photos with nudity to tag them as such, including whether sexual or non-sexual (the napalm girl is clearly non-sexual), and even pornographic (if there is a service that allows pornographic images). The rule then is that the uploader must tag certain tags if appropriate (e.g. non-sexual nudity), and so on. Then users have users settings on whether to block such tags, and if they see untagged images which should have been tagged, and would have been blocked given their settings, then there is the 'inappropriate image' system. When it comes to sexual nudity stuff, if present at all, there should be checks on users. Then AI can flag possible non-tagged images. This really ought to be well within what Facebook can do. In addition, with sensitive stuff (like the revenge porn stuff), there should be terms and conditions where blatant stuff like that european lawsuit is about can lead to details of uploaders being sent either to police or the victim's lawyers.
The problem is to try too hard to have an idiot-proof one-size-fits-all acceptable image policy.
Re: (Score:2)
The same AI they used to recognize naked and frightened children, could just as easily fingerprint famous images. (actually it would be simpler). It would be pleasant if people had thicker skins.
Re: (Score:2)
This wasn't an AI. It was a non-A I. Facebook use an army of human moderators. If you click the button to report inappropriate content, they are the ones who inspect it.
Some minimum-wage drone had this flash on their screen, checked it against their list of forbidden material, and ticked 'child with exposed genitalia' or something like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do there need to be "acceptable nudity policies"?
I generally consider people who worry about nudity to be sick, and I wouldn't object if they got free medical treatment for their problem (except I don't think there is any accepted medical treatment).
I also consider those who support most censorship to be sick, with a similar comment. There are a few cases where public safety does indicate that censorship is desirable. E.g., people's bank account numbers, instructions in how to weaponize anthrax, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe we should just get away from nudity being an issue. The more we try to hide it, the more it gets fetishised.
It's how I would have done it (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened at Facebook was a mistake, but I would have made the same mistake.
If I owned Facebook, I would have a censorship policy. No naked children would be near the top of the list. It might even be the only thing on it.
I'm certain that most of the photos of naked children in existence are perfectly innocent. I have some of my kids and my parents have some of me.
But I don't want to host child porn, child rape, or anything like that. It's a plain and simple fact that there are people who abuse children in horrible ways, and if I didn't censor that kind of thing it would be all over the place. I don't give a shit if the law says it's OK for me to host it; I don't want to be part of it.
And you know what else? I don't want to have to examine photos of naked children to try to guess what's going on.
So. No naked children.
So all my minions would know this and censor publication of the Kim Phuc photo because they want to keep their jobs and perhaps because they agree with me.
And then the world would come down on me over the Kim Phuc photo, pointing out that I'm being a dumbass and this is so very clearly and important and historical photo, and I'd relent because in this case they're right and I'm wrong. But no way would I roll over for just anyone out there - it would have to take a lot of pressure for a specific case.
Re: (Score:2)
According to the Intercept they collaborating with the Israeli Government to decide what should be censored. The next time the censorship subject comes up about Facebook it won't be about naked children. Justifying censorship as an algorithmic decision absolves no blame.
I'm sure it will be fine (Score:2)
Understatement of the Year (Score:2)
Facebook hardly ever gets it right. Whatever it does. Facebook can not meaningfully be associated with "right" within any moral framework worthy of that name.
Damage control (Score:2)
If they would have kept their strong policy here, there would be a general discussion about the policy. So they admit a small failure, allow the image and life goes on. Nobody needs to discuss the policies any further, because the image is there, isn't it?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Haha (Score:3, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong with child nudity or photos of it. We have a society that over reacted to a very small minority of abusers - thanks to an incompetent media like ABC - and disturbed folks who consume it.
The napalm girl showed in stark imagery the horrors of the Vietnam Nam war and the hardships the USA was inflicting on the Vietnamese people over ideology.
We don't see that now. Notice how sanitized the coverage is of the wars in Irag and Afganistan? Notice how they never seem to end?
We treat war like
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The napalm girl showed in stark imagery the horrors of the Vietnam Nam war and the hardships the USA was inflicting on the Vietnamese people over ideology
Actually, no. Kim Phuk was bombed by South-Vietnamese bombers; that hardship was inflicted on Vietnamese by Vietnamese.
Re: Haha (Score:5, Informative)
The South Vietnamese were the clients of the US. The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
The truth is that the killings and suffering in Vietnam increased tenfold after the Americans were gone and the civilians were left to face the Communists.
It's okay to suck Communist dick, I just hope you do that for money (as opposed to being so dumb to do it for free).
Re: Haha (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. Yes there were South Vietnamese forces sent to prison for helping the Americans. There's a guy who teaches Math at UIC who is one of them and he's told me the story.
According to the Red Cross, the transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of Vietnam was less violent on those collaborators than the liberation of France in WWII.
So no, the killings and suffering in Vietnam did not increase tenfold after the Americans were gone. In fact they lessened a great deal. Now all we have to do is get rid of the 80,000,000 unexploded cluster bombs from the 250,000,000 that the Americans dropped on Laos between '64 and '73, but I suppose you're going to tell me that Laos got more violent after the Americans left, too.
Re: (Score:3)
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. .
Seriously - ~2 million people fled the country by any means possible (a staggering percentage of whom died in the effort, and the majority of the survivors telling tales of being shot at and losing family to the NVA on their way out).
Pretty sure they weren't leaving a peaceful utopia, sport.
So, do you have better documentation for your assertions than 'my math prof told me'?
Re: (Score:2)
The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
Are you forgetting to mention the Chinese imperialism for a reason?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So Facey bookey profits from Child Portography (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually doubt many people would have criticized that particular photo being left in. It's had rather wide exposure over the decades.
Or rather, they wouldn't have criticized only Facebook about it. It's been all over the media.
With all that in mind, I don't have a problem with their algorithm catching it, it's the picture of a naked minor who is definitely not enjoying herself at the time. Sounds like the filter found exactly what it was supposed to find. I think the people who were offended by it being filtered out are hyperventilating. Yes, it was a mistake, but only because that picture has historical relevance. Managing by exception is an appropriate way to deal with such things as long as they get around to putting it back and adding it as an exception for the future.
Re:So Facey bookey profits from Child Portography (Score:4, Insightful)
it's the picture of a naked minor who is definitely not enjoying herself at the time.
It does not sexualize or exploit her. It depicts her, along with other wounded, terrified children, fleeing a napalm attack. A real napalm attack. IMHO, that means it is not child pornography. It is history.
Re: (Score:3)
It does not sexualize or exploit her. It depicts her, along with other wounded, terrified children, fleeing a napalm attack. A real napalm attack. IMHO, that means it is not child pornography. It is history.
While I agree (and probably most reasonable people would), the fact is that naked pictures of minors above the age of 2 and under the age of 18 are basically considered "suspicious" in almost every case. A few internet searches will quickly show a multitude of stories from the past decade where innocent people making innocent photos of children (e.g., family photos of a young kid during bathtime) have been investigated under child pornography statutes.
The sad state of affairs today is that basically if y
Re: (Score:2)
How silly is it? In many countries it's a criminal offence to possess artistic depictions of sexualised children. Not even photos, just pencil-and-paper drawings.
Re: (Score:2)
I get you. Yes, it's too much to ask an algorithm to detect deep context, at least at the moment. But there do exist algorithms that can compare and match a photograph to a database of historical images. Such an algorithm need only be run when a photograph is flagged. It can then inform the human curator, who may not be aware of the photograph's provenance.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't like FB but I can't fault them for this; content filtering is hard and ad-supported services can't afford to spend much per time or money per user. FB's terrible 'censors' are probably a bunch of overworked and underpaid college students, a few of whom might even know where the Vietnam War was fought. Mistakes will be made.
In this case, mistakes were made, the users protested, FB restored the images, the end.
Wish I hadn't used up mod points (Score:2)
Otherwise plus plus.
Re: (Score:2)
Do I really need to go here, or are you just being willfully silly?
In the off chance that you are serious:
We choose not to give complicit support for actions that cause greivious harm to children. An alarming amount of child nudity in photography is for the purpose of purile "entertainment" of adults at the expense of the children imaged, often involving physical and sexual abuse of these children. We call this kind of image "child pornography", and rightly desire not to encourage it, and instead to active
Re: (Score:2)
The intent of the image is to cause disgust and horror.
Sorry, I disagree. The intent of Nick Ut is known probably only to him but I'd guess he wasn't there to cause disgust and horror, he was there to document.
The entire power of the image is that it hasn't been manipulated, isn't artificially portrayed to cause emotion; it shows reality, and any emotional reaction is because of that reality, not the image of it.
This is one reason war photography is amongst the most honest form of art, let alone photography. Sure, you get the posed images, the action replays, t
Re: (Score:2)
Well, mainly because there are no common-sense policies such as "no child nudity".
When everything is binary, nothing has nuance. That way lies intolerance, authoritarianism and death. There's no common fucking sense to that.
Re: (Score:2)
Bingo.
"No child nudity" is the authoritarians "easy" solution, that results in a morbid distortion that ultimately lacks the reasoning for the prohibition in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
common-sense policies such as "no child nudity"
As others have said, there is nothing common-sensical about that. If someone sees something sexual in an image of a naked child, that someone is the problem, not the image.
Re: (Score:2)
Silly, silly anonymous coward, believing that the political correctness madness does not originate in the liberal left, along with silly ideas about how being rude is always wrong, and nobody should get their feelings hurt ever.
The sad truth is that both sides really just love hearing themselves talk, and hate hearing what the other is saying, to the point that both sides really are totally down with censorship and echochambers.
Re: (Score:2)
She has come to terms with the image and understands the importance of it being published. If she got over it, maybe you can too?
Phan Thi Kim Phuc is an UNESCO Good Will Ambassador and the biography/documentary about her has all proceeds going to the Kim Phúc Foundation, which supports child victims of war. She is hardly asking to be forgotten or for dignity she has been denied. You shouldn't be offended that the the name is what is in the picture. It is awful what she suffered. We should all be asham
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
America still has the draft available as an option, the Selective Service System. All the preparations are maintained - the list of who is eligible, accepted exemptions, procedures for selecting people. It's not currently used for conscription, but it's designed to that in the event of a crisis it can be activated at very short notice.
It would take a dire situation indeed for that to happen though, just because it would be so unpopular and many politicians would lose their next election if they supported it
Re: (Score:2)
As to the draft. No the draft was not a pleasant experience knowing that you had little choice or say but k
Re: (Score:2)
So please, stop calling her this atrocious name.
You can pronounce it "Fook" if it bothers you that much.