Facebook is imposing prissy American censorship on the whole rest of the world
Facebook is imposing prissy American censorship on the
whole rest of the world
By JANE FAE
12 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 1:20PM
Dontcha just hate it when this happens? As content
curator for one of the world's largest social media platforms, you delete a
picture you consider obscene. Then some Norwegian woman writes an angry post.
So you delete her post, too.
I mean, who does she think she is? The Prime Minister of
Norway? Oh wait.
In case you missed it: last week, Norwegian author Tom
Egeland posted to his timeline the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo The Terror of
War, which depicts children, including a naked girl, running from a napalm
attack, as a status concerning photos that "changed the history of
warfare" .
Egeland’s account was suspended. The editor-in-chief of Norway's largest
newspaper, Aftenposten, then published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg protesting
Facebook’s actions, and including the photo.
Facebook removed it from the newspaper’s profile page
which, he objected, restricted “room for exercising my editorial
responsibility”.
Next up, the Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg,
protested, only to be censored in siumilar summary fashion. Finally, following
worldwide outrage at their decision, Facebook backed down.
This is the amusing reality of Facebook's haphazard
content control system, which depends on the whims of its users and the brief
attentions of a horde of human moderators. Everything you post on the platform
can be reported by other users.
Beheadings and eviscerations are allowed so long as the
quantity of gore on display is “not excessive"
When a report comes through a low-paid, often home-based
moderator will check your content against Facebook’s fairly stark guidance, and
either allow it, remove it or escalate. Not infrequently this system does
something stupid enough to go viral – such as censoring a famous work of art.
It's easy to laugh at incidents like these. Too easy.
Because while we're having our fun – and I've certainly had much mileage from
them both as IT writer and as stand-up – Facebook continues, out of sight, to
impose its own version of middlebrow frat boy liberalism on the rest of the
world, erasing minority and national cultures, with nary a squeak of protest
from those who should be speaking up on our behalf.
Take its ludicrous nipple policy. Male nipples are OK,
female aren't, and transgender – well, it depends how they identify! Or look at
the company's ongoing beef with breastfeeding. Or its obsessive categorisation
of precisely what bodily fluids may be depicted and how.
On first sight, this is a fussy, prudish sort of
organisation – but like many American companies it is far less exercised by
violence. Beheadings and eviscerations are allowed so long as the quantity of
gore on display is “not excessive”. And jokes about rape, or violence against
women? Perfectly acceptable, because after all, they are just jokes, and
therefore free speech.
The reality seems to be: no sex please, we're American,
but violence? Bring it on! As for inclusivity: they got the memo, but haven't
quite translated it yet. Hence the somewhat tawdry bleat, as they climbed down
over the Norwegian affair, that some countries might consider this image
paedophilic.
Indeed they might, just as some perverts might drool over
mail order catalogues of children's shoes. But we don't remove children from
our culture because of the actions of a minority.
And this idea that Facebook listens to its users is pure
spin, or self-delusion. Were it truly sensitive then its content policies would
reflect equally Indonesian Islam, African Catholicism and Australian
secularism. It might even respond more readily to minority concerns that the
values it reflects are at best troubling and at worst deeply privileged and
generally obnoxious.
Facebook played the same tactic when it tried to impose
“real names” on users.
Despite many, many groups warning that this policy would
put individuals in danger, Facebook ploughed on – before performing an
embarrassing 360 and claiming that it was imposing this policy out of concern
for victims (absolutely not for reasons of commercial interest, oh no!).
So yes, laugh, but understand that Facebook's immense
cultural influence is pervasive and pernicious: an anaemic American liberalism
dressed up as high-mindedness which few people in government, until recently,
have been prepared to stand up to.
Perhaps the first cracks appeared a year or so back in
respect of the real names policy. I along with others in the UK spent months
attempting to raise this issue with Facebook: not least the fact it almost
certainly broke UK law. In the end, after it became clear that Facebook would
do and say anything other than engage seriously with its critics, we gave up.
A rude awakening arrived in the form of a rulings by the
Hamburg Data Protection authority in Germany, that Facebook's policy breached
individual privacy and was unlawful. The German authorities were interested, as
were their counterparts in Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and France.
Facebook, previously unassailable, was being asked to explain itself.
Meanwhile, protests over Facebook's prissy censorship
have regularly been made by bodies as diverse as the New York Academy of Art and breastfeeding
advocates. But these have as regularly
been shrugged off by Facebook with “you can't please everyone”.
That is what makes the intervention by Norway's PM so
important. For along with her objection to Facebook's censorship, she wrote of
their decision: “What they achieve by removing such images, good as the
intentions may be, is to edit our common history”.
She might also have added: and our culture, too. For
Facebook are very much about cultural homogeneity. Yet, incredibly for a nation
that has so recently so focused on “taking back control”, and frets about the
loss of Christmas tradition, this issue scarcely registers on the national
rageometer.
The roots of this apathy trace back to a Prime Minister,
David Cameron, who thought he could solve all the UK's online ills by
outsourcing censorship (by online moderation and filtering) to US and
China-based companies.
We can also thank the civil service – in this case the
Department of Culture, Media and Sport – that energetically agreed, appointing
senior figures from US filtering companies to oversee our policies, and a
supine Labour opposition, which dared not even bring argue that filtering and
censorship in the UK should at least conform to UK legal requirements.
Perhaps this latest incident will function as wake-up
call. It really should. For Facebook is not just for life events: it reflects
and projects a way of life. And if we really wish to reinforce British values,
we'd do well to examine more critically what is slipped into our culture diet
under the guise of global harmony.
At a glance | Facebook names
There are strict rules about what profile names are
allowed. So what can you do to stop being banned?
Don’t use............
Symbols, numbers, unusual capitalisation, repeated
characters or punctuation
Characters from more than one language
Any titles, E.g. professional titles like “Dr”
Words, phrases or nicknames in place of a middle name
Offensive or suggestive words of any kind
Someone else’s name on purpose
Do use...............
Your “authentic identity”: the name on your formal ID
and/or what your friends call you
An additional name, if you want. eg. maiden name,
professional name or nickname
Nicknames are allowed, if that is what you are really
known as, after drag queens including Sister Roma and Lil Miss Hot Mess
complained in 2014 that their accounts were shut down
For more info, go to facebook.com/help
Comments
Post a Comment