Excuse me for my ignorance: what exactly makes the nudity necessary in this “historical” pic? Why is it, exactly, that we can’t just blur out the sex organs and then let it through?
But the government uses private organisations to help with deletions - here in Germany the gov more or less gives FB free hand with defining illegitimate content (“Initiative für Zivilcourage Online”) and supports financially the Amadeu Antonio Foundation* to patrol the web and demand cleanups.
The responsible ministers (mostly Maas, justice, and Schwesig, family affairs) seem to be proud that they successfully outsourced censorship**.
* an anti-racism organisation with laudable aims and (sometimes) questionable methods
** not exactly with this wording, though…
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Why do people even use Facebook? I’ll never get it. Want to stay in touch? Use your phone or meet up. Want to stay up-to-date: Twitter. Facebook is a horrible pool of bore and vanity contest.
Left it years ago and never looked back.
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Give up on… the current paragraph?
As for the issue itself, you’re 100% correct. FB could easily just whitelist this image if they had the moral courage, no? Reverse image search is a thing that exists, therefore it can be automated. No moderation required beyond the initial flagging as “acceptable”, surely…
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Um … because we don’t?
As @Nelsie wrote earlier in this thread:
I’m pretty sure Facebook has the ability, and the money, to hire skillsets besides software engineers.
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“we don’t think this can be solved perfectly, therefore we’re not going to do anything”?
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Facebook is under no obligation to host or link to any content that they don’t want shared on their platform. Maybe we should be a bit more skeptical of those who claim that they need to fetishize this child’s suffering to make whatever didactic political point they think they’re making by distributing this photo. Not sure why they feel so entitled to “freely express” an image depicting a naked child’s abject misery in the first place. Seems a tad exploitative. Clearly this is the kind of image that can be easily misinterpreted without proper contextual information, and Facebook is not a platform that demands—or even invites—due consideration. Posting the image there is unnecessary and irresponsible.
I wasn’t trying to tilt at unrelated windmills, I was providing an example for how the absence of legal obligations for companies is completely irrelevant to the discussion of moral obligations for companies.
I happen to believe that platform providers should stay out of the censorship business as far as possible, just like public transport companies have neither the right nor the obligation to choose the people they transport. Just imagine making them responsible and allowing them to administer private no-fly and no-bus listes. Shudder.
I’m well aware of this, and I don’t like it, either.
I think censorship is sometimes necessary and always dangerous, so it must always be kept under direct democratic control, and not delegated to unaccountable private organisations.
In Austria, I’ve heard a lot of complaints that Facebook censors perfectly appropriate pics for showing too much skin, while dragging their feet on obviously illegal hate speech and neo-nazi propaganda, so there’s been talk about “forcing FB to comply with local law”.
Why the hell should we? Why do unnecessary parts of historical pics need to be censored? Why should European public discourse submit to American standards of prudishness unless we prove the nudity is absolutely essential? That image was in my grade 8 history textbook, why should we start censoring it now?
If by “aboriginal” you mean “from any culture less prudish than the US”… otherwise, I don’t see what being “aboriginal” should have to do with it.
There are probably plenty of pics of dressed kids that pedos can get off to. And consider Rule 34; what strange people get off to in their own houses should not be a reason for censorship. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure my parents still have a few pics that show me naked as a child. And they’ve probably shared those with my grandparents. I would very much object to defining that as illegal.
True. I propose that FB should allow non-pornographic nudes of kids but delete all nazi propaganda and all statements implying that people who do not adhere to the right belief system will be punished in hell. Which would bring it more in line with local culture where I am. Would that be acceptable for the American public?
The only way out of this is to go for some kind of “common carrier” status, where the platform provider has neither the right nor the responsibility to delete inappropriate content. Censorship is something that needs to be under direct democratic control, and which requires due process. Not an anonymous algorithm that is developed by American engineers and makes final decisions.
I also consider this necessary for reasons of market freedom: will new startups potentially replacing FB be able to afford a full suite of censorship algorithms and a full staff of human censors right from the start?
No legal obligation, true. So what? FB is providing a platform that is being used for a non-trivial amount of public discourse. In the present case, a newspaper was publishing articles on their facebook page. And if you’re providing a platform for public discourse, you gain the moral obligation to be a neutral platform for public discourse, and not exercising arbitrary, unaccountable censorship according to rules foreign to the culture in question.
No. The image was part of a newspaper article, which was also posted on facebook. Plenty of context, nothing irresponsible about it. And as for the necessity: I consider it necessary for a free society that newspaper authors don’t need to think about a foreign company’s censorship policies when writing an article for a newspaper. And I consider it necessary that newspaper readers don’t get subtly censored versions of their newspaper when they read it through a different medium. Nowadays, it seems to be necessary for business reasons to keep an up-to-date facebook page for your newspaper. I don’t like that, but still: necessary.
Don’t fall for the fallacy fallacy. It all depends on the relative costs of the various mistakes. We can’t come up with an algorithm that reliably calculates who will commit crimes in the future, so should we lock up people based on our imperfect results? Likewise, I do not think we should accept that chilling effect for a major public space (which just happens to be privately owned). Share your art with your friends on facebook, as long as it doesn’t even come close to these arbitrary categories!
After all, why is it even necessary to censor nude pics on facebook? Is it not enough to drag the people who have shared actual child porn off to court a few months later?
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Actually, I want people to drop the use of the word “outrage” in everyday internet discourse because it’s a cliché; a lazy, tired, senescent cliché so lacking in energy that no-one who uses it seems to be aware that it’s hyperbole.
There’s nothing wrong with hyperbole in the hands of those who are actually wielding a point. As I am: a corporation, to the extent that it can be considered a sentient construct, if it is aware of only one thing, money, will pursue that and nothing else. This is not a good thing, as has been demonstrated time and again. A person who only cares about money is a monster, personal experience should have taught you by now. A construct made of people who collectively are only about the money is also monstrous, as our collective history has shown, whether it’s a Californian power company, a bank (any bank) in the run-up to 2008 (and since), a political party, or a social networking website.
While it can be a useful methodological stance to examine the workings of a corporation by considering only the flow of money, like energy in an ecosystem, it misses a lot that is important, and to make it the only way to view a corporation is so unbalanced as to make it a lie. Corporations do not spontaneously appear on our social landscape to make money, they exist to provide something in exchange for that money. When they fail to provide that thing because they are too busy making money, and they are too insensate to take notice of the law or their social context, then they have outlived their usefulness and should be taken to the corporate knacker’s yard to be stunned and butchered broken up into their component parts.
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Is there a fallacy where one inaccurately paraphrases what another said to shoehorn it into a fallacy just so you can post a link to said fallacy?Cuz that’s not what I said. At all. Unless you were describing Facebook. Then sure (and sorry 
).
What Facebook is doing now, refusing to reasonably act on a case-by-case basis while they fine tune a flawed system is certainly not the way to go. I believe a good enough solution is probably possible with some combination of technology and human judgementt; the amount of human involvement required on an ongoing basis will be debatable and probably change. I don’t believe a technological culture incapable of achieving usefully accurate text to speech translation algoritms is somehow capable of creating algorithims that can distinguish art from pornography (considering a large subset of humans are even unable to do just that).
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Umm, am I really the only one who picked up on the sarcasm in this post?
Well most people are using it to keep track of friends, relatives, interest groups and cat videos - not viewing historically significant photos that also go against FB’s terms of service. So I think they are still useful for the people using it. You’re right, when it ceases to do that, or is something else better comes along, then you will see a migration, ala MySpace.
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I think you missed the invisible /s tag.
Or more simply: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Personally, I have always argued that professional “artistic” photos of children should be held from public viewing until the child has reached maturity and agrees to it.
This “child” is now middle-aged and very much wants to make this “didactic political point”. She consents to worldwide public viewing of her “abject misery”. Who are you to contradict her?
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Which is exactly why I was speculating about whether FB had become a “government” as governments are held accountable in different ways to corporations; the core argument is exactly that - you can change the direction of a government through voting, whereas whilst a big corporation is theoretically accountable to shareholders, it very rarely is (which is why government regulation is necessary, as even Adam Smith observed.)
And because these corporations have largely passed beyond individual government control, it’s hard to see how they can properly be held to account, since the break-up method will have less and less effect in a globalised world.
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Except that FB are pushing themselves to newspapers as an alternative channel of publication — and then turning around and censoring that channel, and then claiming that they had to do it so bluntly because of American cultural norms (by whose definition?) and that it’s too difficult to offer any alternative than zero tolerance for under-age nudity (and female nipples and breast-feeding pictures, don’t forget). So it isn’t doing the thing they’re selling it as, even if it’s doing the trivial thing you want it to do.
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I’m glad to see this acknowledged on BB.
There’s a tendency that a lot of geeky/technophilic/science-positive people have–and here I’m including people like me, who can barely add or change a light bulb–to separate the world into the wonderful, exciting, thrilling challenges that await us in the techno-scientific future, and then the stupid ugly dark depressing morass of human behavior.
Except they’re totally inseparable. Technologies are human creations that encode, at the level of their DNA, human politics and human values and human assumptions, and they’re deployed amongst humans to the benefit of some humans and the detriment of others. Ditto ideas promulgated in science journals–and here I’m glaring in your direction, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and other people who should know better than to pretend that science is some sort of holy, apolitical process of strip-mining TRVTH from the universe.
Blame my profession (academics from the humanities and social sciences who study science and technology in society) for the fact that this still needs to be said out loud in 2016, but it’s always nice to see it.
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That’s like asking how many wars I think should be in the world to make me happy. I fear it is you who concocts the strawman, “Skeptic” (if that IS your real name).
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