Wpph, 2016
On the iconicity of images.
A naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War, tears streaming down her face. The picture from 1972 by Nick Ut, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, has since been used on various occasions to illustrate the horrors of modern warfare.
But for Facebook, the image of the girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, was one that violated its standards about nudity on the social network.
After a Norwegian author posted images about the terror of war with the photo to Facebook, the company removed it.
The move triggered a backlash over how Facebook was censoring images. When a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, cried foul over the takedown of the picture, thousands of people globally responded with an act of virtual civil disobedience by posting the image of Ms. Phuc on their
Facebook pages and, in some cases, daring the company to act.
Hours after the pushback, Facebook reinstated the photo across its site.
“An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our
community standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography,” Facebook said in a statement. “In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”
The reversal underscores Facebook’s increasingly tricky position as an
arbiter of mass media.
