Facebook will consider if graphic content is deemed ‘newsworthy’ before censoring

Facebook announced Friday that it would begin to consider the newsworthiness and public interest of difficult or graphic content before censoring it for being in violation of its site rules, a process that has also long been a crucial editorial function of news organizations.

The announcement comes about a month after the site censored Nick Ut’s famous documentary photograph from the Vietnam War as a violation of Facebook’s nudity policies. In the coming weeks, Facebook said, it will change the way it enforces its rules for images such as Ut’s, “to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest,” even if that content otherwise violates the site’s community standards.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said that Facebook is “a tech company, not a media company.” When Facebook censored — and then later reinstated — Ut’s photograph, it demonstrated just how hard it will be for the company to keep the two things entirely separate.

Ut’s photograph is an iconic representation of the horrors of war. As a tech company, Facebook saw the photograph as a violation of its rules against nudity. The change on Friday — which will open up the company to weighing its rules and the importance of the image together — could be read as an implicit acknowledgment that decisions like this will no longer be so simple for the platform.

While the company has no plans to exist as a traditional part of the media, Facebook is, in many ways, already very much a part of the media industry.

Forty-four percent of the general population in the United States says it gets its news from Facebook, according to a recent Pew study.

Facebook’s Friday announcement suggests that the company will now play a more active role in making sure that the newsworthiness of the images and videos posted there are not undermined by the rules it designed to protect its users from potentially offensive content.

To do that, Facebook VPs Joel Kaplan and Justin Osofsky wrote on Friday that the company will “work with our community and partners” over the coming weeks to figure out “new tools and approaches to enforcement” for its community standards.

Facebook initially defended its censorship of Ut’s photo in early September but reversed the decision after international outrage, citing the photograph’s historical importance.