This week we are looking at censorship and regulation in Cybercultures and as you all know, I can talk about R18+ rating for video games in Australia until the cows come home. (Un)Fortunately we are looking at regulation and censorship in other areas and one that caught my interest was the policies bought up by Facebook. When looking at these policies in our tutorial it seemed a bit crazy what people could and couldn’t get away with on a widely used social media site, a image of a crushed skull (as long as no insides are showing) was fine but a woman breast feeding was out of the question. So I decided to look at the readings around this and see what is really going on.
To pre-face this, these articles are from 2012 so the policies have most likely been altered but remained secret so I am only able to comment on the material we are given. Adrian Chen posted an article on Gawker in which he talked to an ex-employee of a third party company used by Facebook to moderate its website. Amine Derkaoui quit his moderating job after receiving very minimal pay for the work he was doing. His anger was not subsided after leaving and so he leaked this snapshot of what must be banned on the social media giant’s website.
There is quite a lot there but some of the key points that seem rather ridiculous are deleting ANY photoshopped images of people, whether negative, positive or neutral, images of drunk and unconscious people, or sleeping people with things drawn on their face, and removing pictures of female nipple bulges but not removing male nipples. Chen’s article talks more deeply about each part of the policy and brings up some great arguments, especially over illegal drugs and abortion on Facebook. Mere hours later, Chen found out that the guidelines had been changed, posting another article on Gawker talking about the new changes. It seems however that none of the major issues had been resolved. Chen tells us what has been changed:
- In version 6.1, body fluids were banned. But in version 6.2, “bodily fluids (except semen) are ok to show unless a human being is captured in the process.”
- In version 6.1, all Photoshopped images of someone were banned, whether they were positive or negative. But in version 6.2, only photoshopped images that show someone in a negative light are banned.
- All the pages now say “Proprietary and Confidential.” Wonder why that is.
These changes aren’t a real big difference and some of the points in that policy really need to be addressed on a higher level. However, these readings are from 3 years ago now so are probably quite outdated by 5 more versions of their policy and have no hold in today’s Facebook world. But we are still seeing a lot of images taken down for the wrong reason. Again I will bring up breast feeding because there are pictures of those being taken down daily while Facebook pages with sexual or violent images are still circulating this social media platform. Although what we have seen today is outdated, it seems the policy of today needs a real good looking at.
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