Face it, Mr Zuckerberg, you’re a news editor too
by Peter Preston from Technology | The Guardian on (#1TBCR)
Anyone who decides to run or pull a difficult story from their website, like the Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm, is not just a technologist: he's a publisher
Masters of the world can wobble wildly when prodded hard from below - when, for example, a brushfire of derision and anger makes Facebook cancel its last announcement.
See the sudden swirl of events. Facebook bans a famous war picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing US napalm attack from its pages. The Norwegian writer of the news feature related to it protests and gets dumped from the site for his pains. Norway's prime minister is similarly treated. But the battling editor of Aftenposten, writing a "Dear Mark" front-page letter, finally wins a full Zuckerberg retreat in a mumble of words about "adjusting our review mechanisms".
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