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That seems, to me, to miss the point. No one is surprised a private company censors content, it's the cultural homogenisation on a global service that can grat

That seems, to me, to miss the point. No one is surprised a private company censors content, it's the cultural homogenisation on a global service that can grate, even though it's no surprise. A global service that tries very hard to be the global platform for everything, including news publication (that may have been unsuccessful). No surprise after many years of this most people's networks are on Facebook. No doubt to an American some of the things I, as a Brit, think and do will be plain weird yet Brits are quite close compared to some nations. For all us outsiders, FB (and other US sites) and US attitudes to nudity and violence are, well, interesting. Usually just amusing, sometimes it can be annoying like in the case of this globally famous photo. Don't forget none of us foreigners have a first amendment or rights under it - so that's not even relevant to us. It wouldn't be that hard to have regional appropriate guidelines for censorship, acceptable behaviour and what have you. Then Americans could have American mores, Norwegians theirs, and we can be confused, amused or fascinated when something goes viral enough to overlap. I'd like to preserve more of the global differences - it's what makes the world interesting. We might find others do some things better.

RevHaze 10y ago
You say it wouldn't be that hard to have regional guidelines, but that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do. Even within a country you can have strongly divided opinions on what's appropriate or inappropriate to be hosted on social media, now not only do you need some way to document these (including refining them as norms change), but you also need to implement a system that can "know it when it sees it" so to speak and filter on the fly. That's either going to be a large number of humans filtering the content more-or-less by hand (already got FB into trouble when the humans filtered stories they didn't agree with) or build an automatic screening process that can make the appropriate decisions on the edge cases, which would be difficult to say the least. Additionally, you run into the problem that many social groups overlap. How many German users need to be friends with a French user before they're covered in the same filter? What about an American vs Iranian? Ultimately you need some way to decide how to break ties and at the moment they're all breaking on the side of the US because that's where FB is based. Unless that changes, I don't see a shift to fragment what's considered acceptable on the platform.
soundwave106 10y ago
Us Americans can't even agree though. :) Note that other big American social media services (Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr for a start) are fine with some various degree of NSFW nudity. Yes, I think Americans overall tend to be a bit more squeamish towards nudity than Europeans, and it shows in our content policies to some degree. But a pretty wide spectrum of opinion exists here; the country Facebook was created in is also the country 4Chan was created in. I do agree with you that preserving global differences is important, hence why ensuring the web remains "decentralized" is important. Facebook's content policies aren't a big problem as long as there are compelling alternative social media platforms to switch to if you don't like what's going on.

RevHaze 10y ago

You say it wouldn't be that hard to have regional guidelines, but that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do. Even within a country you can have strongly divided opinions on what's appropriate or inappropriate to be hosted on social media, now not only do you need some way to document these (including refining them as norms change), but you also need to implement a system that can "know it when it sees it" so to speak and filter on the fly. That's either going to be a large number of humans filtering the content more-or-less by hand (already got FB into trouble when the humans filtered stories they didn't agree with) or build an automatic screening process that can make the appropriate decisions on the edge cases, which would be difficult to say the least. Additionally, you run into the problem that many social groups overlap. How many German users need to be friends with a French user before they're covered in the same filter? What about an American vs Iranian? Ultimately you need some way to decide how to break ties and at the moment they're all breaking on the side of the US because that's where FB is based. Unless that changes, I don't see a shift to fragment what's considered acceptable on the platform.

soundwave106 10y ago

Us Americans can't even agree though. :) Note that other big American social media services (Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr for a start) are fine with some various degree of NSFW nudity. Yes, I think Americans overall tend to be a bit more squeamish towards nudity than Europeans, and it shows in our content policies to some degree. But a pretty wide spectrum of opinion exists here; the country Facebook was created in is also the country 4Chan was created in. I do agree with you that preserving global differences is important, hence why ensuring the web remains "decentralized" is important. Facebook's content policies aren't a big problem as long as there are compelling alternative social media platforms to switch to if you don't like what's going on.