Democracy in America | Facebook censorship

Arbitrary and capricious

Genocidal death threats are fine—not so, bare bums

By S.M. | NEW YORK

OVER 1.3 billion people, nearly the population of China, are now active Facebook users. That means a whopping 18% of the world's population logs on to the site at least once a month. The social network is the largest community ever: a place where ideas, stories, images and perspectives are communicated instantly and widely across national, geographical and ideological boundaries.

But whenever a public forum for dialogue is established, rules arise, and Facebook is no exception. The website maintains a list of community standards “[t]o balance the needs and interests of a global population.” Facebook prohibits threats of violence to oneself or others, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content and nudity. You might argue with these categories—an interesting debate has recently sprung up over how social media sites should handle beheadings and other images of extreme violence—but because it is a private organisation, not a government, Facebook has no obligation to publish anything it does not want to broadcast. The First Amendment to the American Constitution only guarantees that national, state and local governments will respect freedom of expression. As a non-governmental entity, Facebook can permit or prohibit whatever content it likes, just as any club can set its own rules for speakers and every newspaper can decide which articles it sees fit to print. If Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, wanted to, he could silence everybody with bad grammar, delete all videos related to ice-bucket challenges or block users who post too many photos of their cats.

But given the staggering amount of content self-published by Facebook users every day, there is no way the site can pre-screen every, or any, post. It relies on users to identify breaches of the community standards. “If you see something on Facebook that you believe violates our terms,” the site implores, “you should report it to us.”

My experience on both ends of the reporting regime suggests the process is neither rational nor transparent. Facebook censors operate under a cloak of anonymity, with no accountability to users. When the Supreme Court issues rulings, the justices present detailed, carefully reasoned (and often quite lengthy) written justifications for their decisions. So whether you agree or disagree with what the Court decides, you at least know the basis of their judgments.

Not so with Facebook. As powerful as the nine Supreme Court justices may be, they are no longer the most consequential arbiters of acceptable speech around. While the justices’ decisions affect over 300m Americans, and establish precedents for years to come, it is a rare individual who says or publishes something that rubs up against the wishes of the government. But for the 1.3 billion users of Facebook, anything you post could lead to an anonymously issued user report. The judgment comes swiftly—and, as far as this correspondent can tell, quite capriciously.

A few weeks ago, when I encountered a Facebook page entitled “Death to Israel” with the following profile image, I sent the authorities a note explaining that the page promotes violence and constitutes hate speech.

A few hours later, I got my answer: the page had been reviewed, but had not been removed. No breach of the community standards had occurred, apparently. Here is the notification I received:

No further explanation accompanied the decision. But lo and behold, a few days later, I received a notification from the Facebook censor board (is it a board?) that my original complaint had been reconsidered and that the page had been taken down after all. I never learned the reason for the reversal and I wasn’t privy to the procedure that inspired the reconsideration. But wait, the plot deepens. After it had been not removed, then removed, the page was subsequently restored—again with no explanation or justification.

Last autumn I found myself banned from the site for 24 hours after posting an archival image to accompany a blog post for another website. The black-and-white photo showed a dozen people at the beach, facing the ocean, with bare bottoms. It was really quite demure: the subjects were some distance from the camera and no prurient interest could plausibly have been stirred by the image. But a buttock is a buttock, the nameless Facebook censor apparently decided, and the image fell under the banned “nudity” category. That earned me a scornful note along with the one-day suspension.

Interestingly, the ironclad rule against nudity is not so ironclad. “We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance,” the site explains, “whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo's David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.” So a penis is permissible when carved by the hand of a master sculptor, and a breast is fine if it is photographed not to titillate but in the course of feeding an infant. There may be a reasonable line to be drawn here, and I am certainly not encouraging Facebook to become the nipple police, but there are many questions one might raise about the category of nudity that rises to the level of “personal importance.” How about any of these Robert Mapplethorpe images, for example? Certainly a lot of nudity, some of it perhaps borderline pornographic, but these are works of art by a famous, if controversial, photographer. Why, then, allow Michaelangelo’s "David" and not Mapplethorpe’s "Marcus Leatherdale"?

In sum, Facebook allows genocidal death threats on its electronic network while banning nude tushies. It has every right to do that. But as the head of a massive public forum that embraces a sizable chunk of humanity, Mr Zuckerberg owes his users more accountability.

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