Facebook will no longer give emphasis on censorship than it had before. They will soon allow more offensive images or stories that feature violence and nudity as long as the content is newsworthy or important to the public.
“Our intent is to allow more images and stories without posing safety risks or showing graphic images to minors and others who do not want to see them.” Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of global policy said.
This decision came due to embedded controversy about Facebook censorship of the historic ‘Napalm Girl’ naked photo from the Vietnam War, which was posted by a Norwegian Journalist. After all the criticisms and accusations, the social network giant reinstated the post with all the shares and traffic.
Facebook again removed a video showing the aftermath of a fatal shooting of Philando Castile and blames ‘technical glitch’.
On the third time, the network also had apologized and reinstated the Swedish Breast Cancer Awareness Video. While last July, Facebook explains its censorship policy to Techrunch, obviously it needs a better way of implementation, which apparently is what’s coming.
On the other hand, Facebook recently made a survey of its community asking them about the things they wanted not censored.
“In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest — even if they might otherwise violate our standards,” Kaplan said.
To reinforce the proposed policy change, TechCrunch has suggested that Facebook add warnings about graphic content that users will view and prohibit contents that might be offensive to minors. In addition, they suggested installing a content flagging option that something is “graphic but newsworthy”, which would allow users to alert the company about the content that needs warning but shouldn’t be deleted.
Facebook does not function as a media outfit
Meanwhile, Facebook reiterated that they operate as a technology platform, not a media company. They give the users what they want to see and they don’t have editorial responsibilities to prevent censorship even if the post/s content is offensive.
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Mosseri said, “We think of ourselves as a technology company. We know we play a meaningful role in media, yet, our responsibility is to make sure we’re a platform for all ideas. We’re not in the business of deciding which ideas people should read about.”
For some time Facebook has been struggling with the censorship issue, the company decided to relax its community standards especially on posts concerning the public’s interest. The social network should start making a flexible censorship to address the issue. It is, after all, their responsibility as a media company.
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