In the run-up to the Fourth of July, the Liberty Country Vindicator, a small local newspaper in Texas, posted sections of the declaration of the independence to its Facebook page, in a bid to encourage discussion of US history among its readership.
What must have seemed like a benign social media strategy managed to fall foul of Facebook’s algorithmic censors, which labeled sections of the declaration hate speech and removed the posts.
Facebook alerted the Vindicator to let them know that the section of the declaration that includes a reference to “merciless Indian savages” was a violation of their community standards.
The declaration’s passage has often been cited as an encapsulation of the dehumanising attitude toward indigenous Americans that the US was founded on. Facebook’s removal of the section arguably put the Vindicator in a position of whitewashing history.
Casey Stinnett, the managing editor of the paper, said in a post on the site on Monday that the removal also put them in a “a quandary about whether to continue with posting the final two parts of the declaration … should Facebook find anything in them offensive, the Vindicator could lose its Facebook page”.
Facebook has since apologised and reinstated the post, but it’s not the first time algorithmic censors have tried to censor important historical artefacts because they are considered obscene.
Earlier this year, an account dedicated to LGBT History posted the 1992 Zoe Leonard poem I Want A President, which has the opening line: “I want a dyke for president.” The poem, which has previously been displayed in a 20ft by 30ft piece of public art in New York, was removed by Instagram for violating its community standards. In response, hundreds of other accounts also posted the poem, with Instagram playing whack-a-mole trying to remove them. The chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was among a number of influential art and literary figures that posted the poem and had it removed by the site. After a days of removals, Instagram apologised, said there had been a “mistake” and reinstated the posts.
In 2016, Facebook removed a posting of Pulitzer-prize winning photograph The Terror War and suspended the account of Norwegian Tom Egeland. The photograph shows children, including the naked nine-year-old Kim Phúc, fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. In response, a Norwegian newspaper wrote a front-page editorial defending Egeland and displaying the photograph. Facebook also removed the newspaper’s posting of the front page, alerting them that: “Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed.”
These errors in censorship might appear trivial, but as an ever-increasing amount of internet usage takes place within a tiny number of social media sites, it is likely these kinds of challenging works or honest reflections of history will reach fewer people. As Stinnett says, outlets like theirs have become “dependent, perhaps too dependent, on Facebook to communicate with local residents”.