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Norway Leader Joins 'Napalm Girl' Protest Against Facebook

by Associated Press

   COPENHAGEN, DENMARK --

   Norway's prime minister on Friday challenged Facebook's restrictions on
   nude photos by posting an iconic 1972 image of a naked, screaming girl
   running from a napalm attack in Vietnam. Facebook quickly deleted it.
   The Pulitzer Prize-winning image by Associated Press photographer Nick
   Ut is at the center of a heated debate about freedom of speech in
   Norway after Facebook removed it from a Norwegian author's page last
   month.
   Many Norwegians have since posted the photo on the social media network
   in protest, and Prime Minister Erna Solberg joined them on Friday.
   Facebook removed her post within hours, said Sigbjorn Aanes, one of
   Solberg's aides.
   "What they do by removing images of this kind, whatever [the] good
   intentions, is to edit our common history," Solberg told the Norwegian
   news agency NTB.
   Facebook, in a statement from its European headquarters in London,
   responded that "it's difficult to create a distinction between allowing
   a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others."
   The little girl in the image, Kim Phuc, is naked and crying as the
   napalm melts away layers of her skin.
   Several members of the Norwegian government followed Solberg's lead and
   posted the photo on their Facebook pages. One of them, Education
   Minister Torbjorn Roe Isaksen, said it was "an iconic photo, part of
   our history."

   Solberg later reposted the image with a black box covering the girl
   from the thighs up. She also posted other iconic photos of historic
   events, such as the man standing in front of a tank in Beijing's
   Tiananmen Square in 1989, with black boxes covering the protagonists.
   "While I was on a plane from Oslo to Trondheim, Facebook deleted a post
   from my Facebook page," she wrote. "Today, pictures are such an
   important element in making an impression, that if you edit past events
   or people, you change history and you change reality."
   Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published the photo on its front page
   Friday and also wrote an open letter to Facebook founder Mark
   Zuckerberg in which chief editor Espen Egil Hansen accused the social
   media giant of abusing its power.

   Hansen said he was "upset, disappointed - well, in fact even afraid -
   of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society."
   "We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express
   themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our
   global community," Facebook's statement said. "Our solutions won't
   always be perfect, but we will continue to try to improve our policies
   and the ways in which we apply them."
   Paul Colford, AP vice president and director of media relations, said:
   "The Associated Press is proud of Nick Ut's photo and recognizes its
   historical impact. In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful
   image."