Free speech online. Smokin’
p2pnet news Freedom | P2P:- Two people smoking, and they both appeared on Yahoo’s Flickr about a year ago.
On the right is Dutch photographer Maarten Dors who, “shows his picture of a Romanian child smoking a cigarette entitled The Romanian Way at his home in Enschede, Netherlands, Tuesday, April 15, 2008,” says a post on newshopper.sulekha.com, going on >>>
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo from it’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, on the grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking.
Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that _ far from promoting smoking _ the photo had value as a statement on poverty and …….
Rant in a public park and you won’t be thrown out.
But say it online and, “you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed”.
So says the Canadian Press pointing out >>>
Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal.
Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they co-operate with regimes like China.
They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.
It’s a, ” fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth,” the story states, continuing, “but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms”.
Under discussion is the story centering on Dors’ pic of the boy because after Yahoo reinstated it, “another employee deleted it again a few months later,” says AP, which has Dors saying:
“I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid. It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete.”
But, balancing “competing needs can get thorny,” says AP, quoting Christine Jones, GoDaddy.com general counsel, as saying:
“We’re obviously sensitive to the freedoms we have, particularly in this country, to speak our mind, (yet) we want to be good corporate citizens and make the Internet a better and safer place.”
ISPs dompt have to “police content,” but neither are they prohibited from doing so, says the story, adding:
Dors ultimately got his photo restored a second time, and Yahoo has apologized, acknowledging its community managers went too far.
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.Stumble It!
Flickr – This Is Today! (36), July 21, 2007
Canadian Press – ‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry constitutional speech rights, July 6, 2008
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July 7th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Sooooo……showing a kid smoking in a mainstream movie is okay, but not on Flickr?
July 7th, 2008 at 10:00 am
maybe they argued again with “zeh germanns” government and deleted the pic because advertisements for smoking are not allowed in germany anymore
That’s (arguing with laws [in the other case even with one that do not even exist in their way of interpretation] in .de) what they did when Flickr thought it would be a cool add on to not only offer language localised versions in german and many other languages but also a default censoring setting for germans to be only able to view the “save to view for everyone and their cat”- classified pictures. And other then the rest of the world that is able to set the Flickr filter like the person wants, germans were/are not allowed to deactivate/modify the setting!
July 8th, 2008 at 8:38 am
“ISPs dompt have to “police content”
“dompt”?