Facecrook
Robbing artists of their right to freedom of expression
In this generation, technology is an integral part of how one communicates, functions, and schedules one’s self. Communities no longer exist only in schools and towns and neighborhoods— the largest community we have access to is inside our homes, available on our computers. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other online networks have so many of the same elements of the real world; relationships, statuses of friends, stories, recorded memories — endless interactions. All of these interactions, however, are monitored by and dictated to the standards of what the website deems as acceptable or appropriate. Social networks are privately owned and operated corporations that do have the right to limit the ways in which their product is used or interacted with by the public. However, social networks such as Facebook unjustly control the exposure of personal statements and artworks based on inflexible Terms of Use which distorts and limits our basic rights to freedom of speech and expression while using their website.
My experience with Facebook has always been a placid one, and how closely the site was monitored had never been of particular interest to me. In January 2010, I had been working on a series of photographs exploring the versatility of the human body as a close friend of mine was going through a transgender surgery. While Jace was healing from his mastectomy, I asked to photograph him to try to capture the ambiguity of his appearance and explore and document transgender issues. The photos ranged from topless close ups, to full body with the bottom half clothed, and a few full body nudes with all genitals carefully covered.
As a thank you to Jace, as well as to allow my friends to see the final edits, I created a Facebook album containing these photos. Jace was very proud of both the surgery he had gone through and the photographs that were taken of him, and he chose to post one of the waist-up chest shots to display as his profile picture. We both carried on with our usual routines both online and in the real world after these images were posted.
Photo © 2010 Lindsey Daniels: from the Confused series
On February 2nd, 2010, we both received e-mails from Facebook administrators that read as follows:
You uploaded a photo that violates our Terms of Use, and this photo has been removed. Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence, or other violations of the Terms of Use. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children who use the site.
Jace and I were both caught off guard by this message, mainly because neither of us saw the photos as an attack, or even containing nudity. Jace felt targeted for being a transgender person, and I felt as though my work was being marked as offensive as opposed to conveying an enlightened commentary on trans issues. Worse, still, the e-mail from Facebook did not offer the opportunity to defend my work or argue the case.
Facebook has a very in-depth and elaborate Terms of Service posted on their website. The Terms of Service is put in place to protect the company from unwanted or notorious affiliations to material that could be considered controversial. The company understandably needs to consider that another server or search engine can indirectly access material hosted on their website, and this could cause legal complications for Facebook if offensive or illegal material posted by a user was pulled up through another site. These terms cover general usage of their site as well information regarding copyright and what the company has the right to do with the material users post on their account.
““It nullifies the laws that pertain to the individual user and eliminates the decentralized nature of the internet.””
Interestingly, Section 5 is titled Protecting Other People’s Rights, and the section refers to the exemptions to freedom of speech in regard to your actions to other users, and the administrators right to remove any material seen as unfit for the website, but nothing about your right to freedom of speech. The terms of service also state that filing a claim against Facebook with intentions of taking it to court requires submission of personal jurisdiction and submission to the laws and practices of Santa Clara County, California. This is an acceptable procedure for a private company to implement, however it nullifies the laws that pertain to the individual user and eliminates the decentralized nature of the internet.
Social networking sites have other tools built into the software that promotes smaller offenses of censorship. For example, one of the newer features of Facebook allows any user to ‘flag’, ‘report as spam’, or ‘mark as inappropriate’ on any post, photo, or comment made by their peers. These tools can function beneficially when used properly (i.e. viral posts of advertisements or if a page has been hacked by some other user) but there also is no check or defense if one of those tools is used spitefully or unfairly on an undeserving post.
The Internet has become known as an information superhighway, and it allows Americans a vast resource to sites, images, and documents. The primary feature of the Internet is that it is decentralized, meaning that it is not clearly sourced from one definite location, which allows the content to cross jurisdictions. This indirect association with a country or a state, and ultimately an identity, invites users to explore their freedom of expression. It allows the internet to become an unrestricted and publicly accessible medium. A more recent internet development is the phenomenon of social networks, and how they allow the members to have publicly posted content available to the online community with little to no effort: an eternal, resonating voice. However, post 9/11, state action has begun to change the online policies. These changes include more wide swept proxy usage and blacklisting particular websites based on meta-data content. Proxy usage and blacklists are a blanket way of routing around material and information that is determined inappropriate by machines that pull out key words or images that have potentially negative or illegal connotations. However, because machines are doing the filtering, a lot of content can easily be misread as inappropriate. For example, my photographs could have been scanned by one of these proxies or blacklists and registered as offensive because the content could not be read for its conceptual value.
““Overblocking limits the average user from obtaining material that should rightfully be available to them, as well as infringes on the rights of the authors of unrightfully banned or blocked material.””
These tools are implemented on Facebook to prevent the company from being associated with any potentially offensive content causing them to be listed on a ‘blacklist’ or violate any state laws. The technical and non-technical proxies and technologies required to sift through user content properly is more expensive and time consuming than just eliminating the problem user or website; so high profile companies such as Facebook are more willing to completely removing the content and/or source of content that causes any form of objection. Facebook is a private company that does have the ability to write documents, such as the Terms of Service, which prevents spamming and unwanted material. However, within these recently applied censoring tools, there is much oversight of the rights of some users. When sites are blacklist filtered, many websites with so called controversial material can be easily perceived, or overblocked, as a site that deserves to be blocked by a robot filtering through search results. Seth Kreimer gives the example of an ISP or search engine reading a series of family photos as child pornography. Overblocking limits the average user from obtaining material that should rightfully be available to them, as well as infringes on the rights of the authors of unrightfully banned or blocked material. For example, the court found that 1.2 million websites were wrongfully banned when the state ordered that four hundred target sites were shut down in Center for Democracy & Technology v. Pappert. Facebook suffers from overblocking because of its unchecked system of reporting ‘flagged’ content and by the computerized system for filtering though content and deleting material that registers to that computer as offensive or inappropriate. Another example of a company that had fallen into censorship and overblocking is the popular search engine Yahoo! which agreed to a Public Pledge in China that agreed to not displaying results to certain material deemed unacceptable by Chinese government, which resulted in the group Reporters Without Borders fighting for the right to public expression, and claimed that the company violated their human rights as well as attacked the foundation of democracy.
The aforementioned injunctions such as proxies, firewalls, and blacklists lead one to wonder about the future for the Internet as well as the definition of Freedom of Speech as we know it. Technology has allowed us to openly post and access content of all different opinions and values, and even more recently has developed tools that put all internet users at risk of encountering or being censored. The up rise of state interference of online communities and postings jeopardizes the depth of our human right to freedom of expression and the democratic opportunity of having our voices be heard.