Norway’s Prime Minister has joined escalating protests over censorship by Facebook, posting an iconic Vietnam war picture to her profile and re-publishing a mock-edited version after it was removed by the social network.
Erna Solberg’s post was the latest development in a row over photographer Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning picture of a naked Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running down a road after being injured in a napalm attack on her village in 1972.
The controversy started as Facebook removed the "Napalm Girl" picture from thriller writer Tom Egeland’s profile because of its rules on nudity. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten then published the picture on its Facebook page, which was also censored. The newspaper on Friday published an open letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to protest against the action.
“I appreciate the work of Facebook and other media to stop pictures and content showing abuse and violence,” Solberg said in a comment she posted with the picture. “But Facebook gets it wrong when it censors pictures like these. It contributes to restricting the freedom of speech.”
A little more than three hours after Solberg posted the picture on Friday morning, it was also removed -- by Facebook, according to Solberg. The prime minister responded by re-posting a blacked-out version of that picture and several other iconic photographs, such as the “Saigon Execution” and that of the unknown protester who stopped Chinese tanks after the Tiananmen Square repression in 1989.
“What Facebook does by removing images of this kind, good as the intentions may be, is to edit our common history,” she wrote. “I hope that Facebook uses this opportunity to review its editing policy, and assumes the responsibility a large company that manages a broad communication platform should take.”
Facebook is facing criticism over its regulation of content as it aims to find a universal standard to apply to its 1.7 billion monthly users, and bans on pornography prevent posting art or historic photographs such as the one at the heart of the controversy in Norway.
Facebook said it was seeking to strike a balance between enabling free speech and “maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community".
“While we recognise 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,” an unidentified Facebook spokesperson said in an e-mailed comment. “Our solutions won’t always be perfect, but we will continue to try to improve our policies and the ways in which we apply them.”