
Facebook apologises for removing breast cancer awareness video - xufi
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37721193
======
jacquesm
Just imagine the harm seeing a breast can do to a vulnerable young child. /s

Facebook needs to literally grow up, removing porn is one thing but clinical
images, mothers feeding their children and such should not even be up for
discussion.

It's a fine line between protecting your users from seeing offensive content
and outright censorship, good to see them doing the right thing in this case,
pity it is still on a 'case-by-case' basis instead of a healthy review of
their policies.

The main criterion seems to be 'is the internet raising a large enough stink'?
If yes then restore the image.

~~~
ravenstine
Why can't Facebook filter out whatever they want to filter out? I mean, you
wouldn't want to see penises all over your feed, and not everyone necessarily
agrees with you about the appearance of breasts(except me, I want more breasts
on my Facebook), so I can understand why Facebook would make such a decision
without necessarily deeming it as wrong. Nobody has to use Facebook. And their
main criterion, "is the internet raising a large enough stink", seems
perfectly reasonable to me. But what a weird world we live in that a short-
lived incident about womens' breasts ending with an apology from Facebook gets
a news story. Then again, it's the BBC, so I shouldn't be surprised.

~~~
DanBC
> Why can't Facebook filter out whatever they want to filter out?

Why can't people let Facebook know what should and shouldn't be filtered?

Facebook already have policy that breasts are ok when they're raising
awareness of breast cancer or being used to feed children, so facebook is
ignoring their own existing policy.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The naked female body is only acceptible in a medical or child-rearing
countext.

No. We need to reject this ideology. It is wrong wrong wrong.

We need to stop perpetuating this lie.

Naked human bodies are wholey unremarkable in the strongest sense.

~~~
oldmanjay
I'm not even close to a prude about nudity, but I utterly reject that you may
have any say about my attitude toward it.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
That's fine, so long as your attitude toward it doesn't perpetuate female body
shaming nor prevent my retina from being exposed to the female anatomy because
of some misguided belief that the naked female breast constitutes pornography
outside the scope of medicine and breast-feeding.

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alex-
I find it surprising that this is newsworthy.

It appears that Facebook never argued that the image was in breach of its
policies. Just that some software it runs had a bug that miss classified this
image.

Then when challenged they apologized and approved the add.

So to me the summary appears to be "Software company has bug that effected one
customer, apologies and fixes the issue" which must happen every hour of every
day...

Am I missing something?....

~~~
ianlevesque
Well, it's Facebook.

------
h4nkoslo
"Breast cancer awareness" is a thing only because it is a form of signaling
that privileges female bodies. That's why it has such tremendous buy-in
despite already saturated "awareness" going back 20 years, or the fact that
there are a half-dozen causes of death with greater preventibility and
lethality even just considering women.

I'm really tired of people engaging in pointless signaling campaigns and
expecting to get points for being So Brave in the face of ~ universal
consensus that they are correct, or taking minor bureaucratic snafus like this
as evidence that they are somehow not in a position of complete victory.

------
pyrophane
Every time I see these I think the same thing: this shouldn't be an issue. If
we weren't allowing so few players to define so much of our experience of the
internet, it wouldn't matter that much what any single one of them decides to
censor. Hopefully it will be that way again someday.

~~~
tdb7893
I think part of the problem is that companies need to censor these sorts of
images or run into regulatory trouble because being an "adult" site has some
regulatory implications they don't want to run afoul of

------
fnbr
This reminds me of the incident with the Norwegian newspaper posting the
"Napalm Girl" photo.

Facebook is trying to automate the detection of illegal/unwanted images, and
it seems extremely difficult to detect the context of the image to the extent
that you can differentiate between acceptable images of human bodies, and
unacceptable images (which would be, I assume, the vast, vast majority of such
images posted).

I wonder how they could proceed with this- maybe with some sort of anomaly
detection, where you do a first pass to detect all images containing the
unwanted features (e.g. naked bodies), and then a second pass to try and
detect the activity that's going on, or to detect if the image is famous (e.g.
a picture of David, the famous Italian statue, would be acceptable, while a
photo of a naked man in the same position would presumably not be).

[1] [http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/09/12/sheryl-sandberg-
respon...](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/09/12/sheryl-sandberg-responds-to-
norway-pm-over-facebook-photo-censorship/)

------
geff82
As long as they remove breast pictures instead of pictures of beheadings (I
complained several times as they appeared in my newsfeed, but they were always
deemed as "ok"), our world is not going anywhere in terms of peace.

~~~
mcbits
They do censor pictures of beheadings, even in "private" messages between
consenting adults. Or at least they did several years ago.

~~~
geff82
They allow pictures that are so shocking horrific that one has to vomit.

------
striking
I understand why it is this way. "Perfect is the enemy of good" and all that.
It's probably much cheaper to run a system that is imperfect.

But it bothers me that we leave so much of our discourse to such imperfect
systems.

------
tomcam
Good for them. Next: stop the Prager University videos from being suppressed.

~~~
judah
I think you're mistaken: it's Google/YouTube that has placed several of the
excellent Prager University videos under restricted mode. Not Facebook.

I'm not aware of Facebook suppressing the Prager University videos.

And in the YouTube case, it's likely an automated response to (mis)flagging by
users who politically differ.

~~~
tomcam
Ow! Thank you,judah.

------
turblety
I do agree this is ridiculous and they should be embarrassed about this kind
of stuff, but I do want to remind people that Facebook is an advertising
product selling "you" to advertisers. They have to please their advertisers,
not users. I am glad to see people complaining. I hope people continue to
complain and news outlets like this ridicule them, but until we stop giving
our information away for free to these corporations, they are going to
continue to do immoral and dangerous activities. Facebook is not the problem
here. We are!

------
tn13
Facebook is eventually going to get into more systematic mess over this sort
of rubbish.

Have one single clear principle and apply is consistently. Change the
principle don't make exceptions if needed. "Educational videos wont be
removed" could have been a good policy that Google has had for Youtube.

Or even "No Breasts"can be a good policy too. If you want to show breast
cancer videos do it on you tube, shoot it with a prop or link to another page.
I dont see why that does not work.

