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Facebook's Censorship Of Napalm Girl Is History Repeating
- by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, September 16, 2016
She’s known as the “Napalm Girl,” and she appears in a photograph called "The Terror of War," taken by Nick Ut. In it, she is young, naked and clearly terrified.
Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for the photo in 1973, which is credited with turning the tide of public opinion …
2 comments about "Facebook's Censorship Of Napalm Girl Is History Repeating ".
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Let's just hold our horses there, Ms. Colbin. Are you forgetting that Mr. Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire, and that multi-billionaires are the New Royalty, to be blindly obeyed at every turn, without ever having their judgement questioned by mere mortals? Long live the child-king!
This is what happens when all the eggs, or most of them, are placed in a single basket. In this case, we have a widely known example - the Nick Ut photo - showing just how close we are to mindless censorship. But what about the little things that may be, or may already have been pulled-down by those few who think they need to "protect" us?
The outrage over the censoring of the Ut photo must become a lot louder than it is now, since it represents just the tip of the iceberg. We all know that the internet has changed the journalism game, but the rules of journalism must not also be changed to suit those who run the internet show.
Obviously, the deletion of this historic photo and the algorythem that drove the system to do it were at fault. And yes, Facebook is not referred to as 'Fecebook' for nothing.
That said, with the ever growing tsunami of material that gets posted, even the keenest eyed editor would go blind.
The answer is obviously to adjust the algorythems where possible but to build in to the system that anything that will be deleted goes to a human level bnefore it disappears.