Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' post row escalates

Facebook has deleted a post by the Norwegian prime minister in an escalating row over the website’s decision to remove content featuring the Pulitzer-prize winning “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam war.

Erna Solberg, the Conservative prime minister, called on Facebook to “review its editing policy” after it deleted her post voicing support for a Norwegian newspaper that had inadvertently fallen foul of the social media’s guidelines.

Solberg was one of a string of Norwegian politicians who shared the iconic image after Facebook deleted a post from Tom Egeland, a writer who had included the Nick Ut picture as one of seven photographs he said had “changed the history of warfare”.

Egeland was subsequently suspended from Facebook and his standoff with the social media giant was reported by the daily newspaper Aftenposten, which used the same image in its reporting of the story and itself came under pressure from Facebook to delete the picture.

Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Espen Egil Hansen, said the newspaper had received a message from Facebook asking it to “either remove or pixelize” the photograph. He refused and wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg saying he was failing to live up to his role as “the world’s most powerful editor”.
Source:The Guardian