Updated at 3:22 on September 9
NEWS BRIEF The black-and-white photograph is iconic: It shows children, including a naked girl, wailing in pain in the aftermath of a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Its impact turned the tide of American public opinion against the conflict and won the man who took it, Nick Ut, a Pulitzer Prize. But this week, the photograph did not make it past Facebook’s censors.
Tom Egeland, the Norwegian author, recently tried to post historic images from war on Facebook. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted one of those images—the one at the top of this story. When Egeland reacted to the deletion, that post was deleted, too, and his account suspended, according to Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper.
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor of Aftenpost, in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, outlined what happened when the newspaper posted its story, with the image, on Facebook.
The demand that we remove the picture came in an e-mail from Facebook’s office in Hamburg this Wednesday morning. Less than 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, and before I had time to give my response, you intervened yourselves and deleted the article as well as the image from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.
He added: “I am writing this letter to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove a documentary photography from the Vietnam war made by Nick Ut. Not today, and not in the future.”