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Facebook Backs Down on Censoring ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo
- joesmo 10y ago“While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others." You'd have to be really fucking stupid for this to be difficult for you. I guess FB finally realized even their users are not all stupid enough to believe such a ridiculous statement.
- webwanderings 10y agoIt is difficult probably because they don't want to employ real humans to discern the difference. I'd take their policy over Twitter's. Know how many spam/porn accounts littering on Twitter? At least Facebook is not a home for spammers.
- SysArchitect 10y agoWhat's wrong with porn accounts on Twitter?
- webwanderings 10y agoThey are spam accounts, not porn accounts. Please don't tell me you can't tell the difference.
- Jarwain 10y agoThere are probably both. You lumped them as if all porn accounts are spam accounts when that's very likely not true, and that is what SysArchitect was commenting on.
- nck4222 10y agoI don't know, I can see their point. It's not like they can review every picture individually, so they're going to need a general policy. They messed up, received backlash, and changed their policy based on it.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It's not like they can review every picture individually, so they're going to need a general policy. Even with a general policy, they still have to review whether a picture falls within the boundaries of the general policy. And there is no debate that they need a general policy, the debate is over what that policy should look like.
- joesmo 10y agoMaybe not, but they certainly can have a human review every single potential image after the fact (which they do if I remember correctly) because relying on an algorithm to do this is simply impossible and therefore even dumber than not being able to hire proper content screeners.
- brainfire 10y agoEven if it's executed in the brain of a human content screener, it's still an algorithm- if you want it to be consistent, it has to be documented and clearly communicated to the screeners.
- pessimizer 10y ago> It's not like they can review every picture individually It's exactly like that. They could not allow pictures at all, not censor at all, or close down the business, too. Every option is open to them.
- nck4222 10y agoUhhh, right, but those options aren't really options since it would damage them far more than a policy that needs to be tweaked occasionally. "Shut facebook down" is a bit ridiculous. Congrats, you're technically correct that it's an option open to them.
- ourmandave 10y agoMeaning, difficult to create a filter that "knows it when it sees it." http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/09/27/the-origins-of-justice-stewarts-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/09/27/the-origins-of-justice-s...
- joesmo 10y agoMeaning FB is too fucking stupid to hire a person who knows the difference between child porn and iconic war images. It's not that rare to find people with common sense who can discern the two, even in the US. From what I understand, all these decisions get made by actual humans at FB and therefore have nothing to do with algorithms. The algorithm may flag the initial image, but it's the stupid human that approves that decision.
- sctb 10y agoPlease stop. Insults are not OK on Hacker News, and the need for civility when discussing controversial topics is greater, not lesser. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ourmandave 10y agoGiven the sheer volume, I honestly wonder if a human does ever see it unless it's called out on Twitter (or whatever). Even if it's flagged as an Iconic Image, you have to look at the context and see if it isn't posted by Jared from Subway. Easier to auto flag than make a "waiting for glacially slow human" queue. (Esp. when one-million-moms has a protest van idling on the launch deck 24/7.)
- Raphmedia 10y agoHonestly, that person probably had a form that went: [x] Children [x] Naked And the system did the rest. I doubt they also have [ ] Socially acceptable photo of naked children on the form.
- FireBeyond 10y agoExcept in both instances they acknowledged that it was the result of a 'Report' and then a human review, and not an algorithmic decision.
- pessimizer 10y agoThey could start by rejecting the default assumption that nudity should be considered sexual by default. And maybe the default assumption that sexuality is bad - I don't want them to shift to trying to detect if an image is arousing or not; but I do want whatever censorship system they feel they need to have in place to be able to distinguish between child pornography and a photograph of a child being burned by napalm. "Really fucking stupid" is an understatement.
- forgottenpass 10y agoThey could start by rejecting the default assumption that nudity should be considered sexual by default. And maybe the default assumption that sexuality is bad I agree with the suggestion, but can't help but laugh at how impractical it is. The people who would make the change are bay area progressives working in tech. And that means saying all the "right" things about sex positivity but stopping short of actually becoming sex positive.
- CaptSpify 10y agowell, yeah. that would hurt their bottom line
- xapata 10y ago> being burned by napalm I didn't see any napalm in the image. The girl had removed her burning clothes before the photograph was taken. The reason this particular image is considered acceptable is the historical context. If I were to recreate the image by hiring actors, that would probably be considered child pornography.
- jMyles 10y ago> that would probably be considered child pornography. What on earth are you talking about? Is there anything even vaguely sexual about this photograph? Did I miss something?
- 10y ago
- ibejoeb 10y agoI can't believe you're catching flak for this. It is absolutely not difficult to distinguish between a photo of burning children and a photo of a sex act. In fact, it's pretty ridiculous to characterize this photo as that "of a nude child."
- daveloyall 10y agoI don't see any flames in that picture. I've never seen any flames in that picture, but I've been told (since junior high school) that it is a picture of a burning child. What's up with that? Common sense tells me that the child's clothing was on fire, and she took those clothes off and ran away, and that's what we see a photo of. Fine. But then... why is this photo described as a picture that contains flames? Not just here. That's always how it is described.
- mthoms 10y agoWhat an odd thing to be pedantic about. I mean, that's what bothers you about this photograph? Besides, burning does not require fire to be present. It only requires heat (or chemical reaction).
- daveloyall 10y agoI didn't mean to be pedantic. I merely was asking a question. Bear in mind that it's a question that I first wondered about when I was myself a child.
- ibejoeb 10y agoShe is surely burning. A napalm bomb was dropped on her village. The photo documents people fleeing. Look at her arms; you can see the skin peeling away. Here's a photo of her back: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KZZvVl11PvU/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KZZvVl11PvU/maxresdefault.jpg. This is the life-long damage: http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2015/news/151109/napalm-girl-435.jpg http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2015/news/151109/napalm-gir....
- dragonwriter 10y ago
- nyreed 10y agoToo little too late? They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country. That must surely be a tipping point?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country. I'm not sure it should matter whether it's a Prime Minister or a 22 year old college dropout.
- mikeash 10y agoRegardless of whether or not it should, it seems pretty clear that it does.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> They've set the tone when they deleted a post made by the democratically elected leader of a country. 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.
- forgottenpass 10y agoToo little too late? 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?
- throwanem 10y agoYou're not wrong. But your analysis excludes one salient point: This only works if we permit it. We need not do so.
- byron_fast 10y agoAt least now we know the minimum bar to get Facebook to temporarily pretend to change a policy: be the leader of a first-world nation.
- legitster 10y agoDevil's advocate: I don't see why Facebook isn't allowed to choose what is or isn't displayed on their site. The only reason Facebook is a platform people choose to use is because of the editorial decisions they have been making. And the problem was that the policy was too consistent? That they were not making enough exceptions to the rule for important people?
- mikeash 10y agoOf course they're allowed to choose. And we're allowed to choose to criticize them in public for those choices. And they're allowed to choose to change their actions based on that criticism. Everybody is acting on the basis of their freedoms.
- legitster 10y agoI'm reading this as a non-statement. Like I'm saying that no one should be outraged about this, and you are saying there is no such thing as outrage, just people acting in their own interests. Fine, that's very true, but then that takes the steam out of all arguments everywhere.
- mikeash 10y agoMy point is that you equate outrage to "they're not allowed to," when that's not the case at all. They are absolutely allowed to. If you want to talk about the merits of outrage, you can't start with a false description of what it implies.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Devil's advocate: I don't see why Facebook isn't allowed to choose what is or isn't displayed on their site. 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.
- betolink 10y agoCan Facebook be held accountable under monopoly laws? They are too big and too influential for our own good.
- daveloyall 10y agoAntitrust laws. (I believe that is what monopoly laws are called.) 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! :)
- whamlastxmas 10y agoThis generally applies when they do something that prevents competition. If Facebook made it difficult or impossible for you to use other social media websites, then maybe.
- jMyles 10y agoI'm not a facebook user, so I've never run head-long into this policy, but why doesn't facebook allow photos of nude children? 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?
- barry-cotter 10y agoI'm under the impression that it's exporting the American civil religion worldwide. The idea that people genuinely are different, with radically different cultures and alien values is not one most people get. Witness the Iraq war or the Libya debacle and the assumption that everyone, everywhere really, really wants to have a Western democracy and that it will happen automatically if the Big Bad (Saddam, Qaddafi) is removed. It's like how Americans don't understand that people from other Anglophone countries don't have a taboo reaction to people saying nigger. Facebook assumes American culture is the universal culture and act to make that true.
- kome 10y agoThat's so true. Americanisation worldwide is furthered by projecting US norms and lifestyle as a cultura nullius for all.
- wyager 10y agoWeird American nudity taboos. They don't make a lot of sense.
- pjscott 10y agoIt's all about what someone could plausibly imagine someone else finding arousing. Never mind intent, and never mind content; is there someone, hypothetical or real, who could get off on it? Can pedophiles enjoy it? This policy is not about protecting anyone. It's about keeping up appearances. The same can be said about most policies.
- awqrre 10y agoThey backed down because they figured out who they were censoring?
- aikah 10y agoGood, are we done with fake outrage ?
- npiazza83 10y agowhy?
- swampthinker 10y agoSays it right in the article. They made the wrong decision to censor a historically relevant photograph. So they backed down.
- npiazza83 10y agoWho made the decision within the company? That's way more important than the fact the decision was made. Do they have a new position we were previously unaware of that handles requests for heads of state? What if the request is for the opposite? Who censors things explicitly? Who handles media relations? When? Why? Over what threshold do they consider it to be an issue? Why?
- vkou 10y agoI have no inside knowledge of Facebook's workings, but I speculate that the sequence of events was: 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.
- kinkdr 10y agoOne thing that I don't understand is why all these people that complain about Facebook don't just switch to an open source, distributed Social Network platform. It's not like anybody is forcing them to use FB or that there are no alternatives.
- untog 10y agoQuite literally, network effects. There is no point using an open source, distributed social network if you have no friends on it. In many ways you don't really have a choice about what social network you use, just whether you use one at all.
- tbirdz 10y agoOn the positive side, if you don't know anyone on the network, then it's a great opportunity to make some new friends!
- NotOscarWilde 10y agoMaking new acquaintances is useless if nobody from your 30km radius is on the network or if it is hard to meet people inside this radius. Friendships decay really fast with distance, especially when there is no real strong bond. 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.
- tbirdz 10y ago>Making new acquaintances is useless if nobody from your 30km radius is on the network or if it is hard to meet people inside this radius. Friendships decay really fast with distance, especially when there is no real strong bond. 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.
- untog 10y agoI wonder, do these restrictions also apply to Instant Articles? Because as much as Facebook wants to deny being a media company, if it is providing (and censoring) a platform news organizations publish through it most definitely is one. And it's worth stopping to think about what that means when compared to the open web.
- erickhill 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464883 Facebook to reinstate censored image of ‘napalm girl’
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we merged the previous discussion with this one.
- manachar 10y agoAn interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites. 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.
- scrollaway 10y ago> YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms. 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.
- force_reboot 10y agoyou've just expressed a great counterpoint to https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/. 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.
- Alex3917 10y ago> In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time. 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.
- nerfhammer 10y agoAlgorithms can't tell the difference between porn/gore and historically significant graphic images
- jMyles 10y agoIf an algorithm mistakes this image for porn, it's pretty damn broken anyway.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoNow see how many people can write a description of a way to discern the difference between the two using just the image. I hesitate to say it but experience suggests this probably is 'porn' for some sick person. 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.
- mmmBacon 10y agoIt's extremely difficult for a human to discern the difference let alone computers which for all the ML are still profoundly stupid. 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.
- inputcoffee 10y agoWould we say: 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.
- dragonwriter 10y agoWhether one believes #3 is orthogonal to whether one believes #1 or #2 (or perhaps some other alternative to those two), they are beliefs about different attributes of the affair.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago4. Facebook should not have the marketshare or power it does, and should not censor criticism of itself.
- d33 10y ago#2 - The process is broken. I'd naively suggest decentralization as a solution (yeah, I know it worked great for Diaspora..). 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?
- aetherson 10y agoWhen "the process" that "worked" involved a head of state of a top 30 GDP country getting their post in support deleted before ending up coming up in your favor, then you definitely do not have any evidence that there is a real process that can work.
- abraae 10y agoYeah, And in this case, it took a head of state to get one of the most instantly recognisable war photos of all time past the Facebook censors. 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.
- mc32 10y agoWhy can't FB do like Flickr and deploy a system where people self classify their content and then subscribers can set whether they want all content or safe content as well as provide the "take me back to the kittens" if an image offends...
- beyti 10y agoAm I the only one concerned here about the posts with links requiring to sign up just to read? for people like me, here a link not requiring a signup to read: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-...
- intrasight 10y agoInquiring minds want to know - was it a stupid algorithm or a stupid person at Facebook that deleted those posts.
- Xorlev 10y agoA flood of people flagging the picture, likely.
- rpeden 10y agoIt wouldn't even need to be a stupid person. Just a person who probably won't get in trouble for erring on the side of caution, but could face serious consequences for failing to enforce Facebook's policies. 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.
- tn13 10y agoIt would have made much more sense to say "no nude children" no matter what and consistently apply it. Naplam girl's photo could have been blurred a little and still be shown to convey the exact same message. This sort of exception based polciies would lead facebook into same trouble as the way they were censoring conservative news.
- e12e 10y agoWhat age are children, and is other nudity allowed? Pictures of states like David? It's not dimple to find a moral common ground for the entire world (or even some arbitrary selection of countries that are deemed to have "valid" morals).
- posterboy 10y agoprevious discussion of the aftenposten editor's response, poster of the photo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004
- mtgx 10y agoOh...so Facebook "backs down" after another one of their censorship cases blows up on the Internet. 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.
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- mark_l_watson 10y agoI agree with the comments that having public forums controlled by single companies like Facebook and Reddit can be problematic if they start censoring what people are allowed to post. 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.
- AzzieElbab 10y agoCan't we all agree that tech notwithstanding Facebook is just dumb in every way possible.