Facebook has finally entered the “Monumentally Stupid” zone. Granted they’ve been inhabiting the Twilight Zone of propaganda, financial and algorithm based decisions since before the elections, but this time they’ve crossed the border into idiotic.
Late last year, in December, Italian arts activist Laura Ghianda posted a photo of the famous Woman of Willendorf ...a 30,000 year old statuette...on Facebook and was happily getting recc’s about it and watching it go viral, when it suddenly disappeared. It seems someone on Facebook reported the image and Facebook’s censorship algorithm leapt into action and banned the image. And despite opinions from places like the Natural History Museum, Facebook will not allow the image back on it’s pages.
We know now from a Guardian article just how “in depth” Facebook’s censorship is:
exposed the challenges faced by the social network in policing nearly 2 billion users. The Guardian’s report illustrated how ‘stressful and fast-paced” the environment is for content moderators at Facebook. “They often only have 10 seconds to review something, and the guidelines that govern what is acceptable on the site are not always consistent.”
This is all well and good Mr Zuckerberg, but what is really weird here is that although a super stressed 20-something year old initially banned the post as “dangerous pornography,” a simple button press could have reversed that decision. Because no such reversal was taken, we now know that in a Californian think tank somewhere in Facebook’s HQ, someone decided the “Woman of Willendorf” was indeed “dangerously pornographic.”
Facebook is increasingly being criticized for its censorship values and its double standards are seen no clearer in that only weeks before the banned post the museum made a really gritty post entitled “Stone Age pornography.” And not a chirp from Facebook’s axmen! And, what’s more, right on Facebook’s doorstep in San Francisco, for the 2010 iteration of Burning Man festival artist Marco Cochrane built the famous 7,000-pound naked Bliss Dance sculpture which was installed on Treasure Island in May 2011 at the behest of the city of San Francisco. This figure has drawn countless millions of visitors and Facebook is full of pictures of this piece of modern art.
And yet anytime you want, you an see pictures of naked women in art as paintings or drawings on Facebook...so why censor this incredible statue?
www.ancient-origins.net/…
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Monday Crimson Quillfeather, Tuesday ejoanna, Wednesday Pam from Calif, Thursday art ah zen, Friday FloridaSNMOM, Saturday Gwennedd, Sunday loggersbrat