When "the process" that "worked" involved a head of state of a top 30 GDP country getting their post in support deleted before ending up coming up in your favor, then you definitely do not have any evidence that there is a real process that can work.
Yeah, And in this case, it took a head of state to get one of the most instantly recognisable war photos of all time past the Facebook censors.
That photo was said by some to have been instrumental in bringing home to Americans the brutal effect of the war. It may have actually contributed to shortening the war.
Now imagine if the Vietnam war was underway right now, and that photo was taken 24 hours ago.
This is an important point, particularly considering official Norwegian policy for most of the Vietnam war was to not question the US warfare.
There'd have been no way a Norwegian government at that time would have objected to censorship of an image like this, not least because everyone knew that the US would have reacted strongly, given that the most senior Nordic politician who dared speak up caused quite a stir:
When the then Minister of Education in Sweden, Olof Palme (later PM), took part in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1968, the US withdrew their ambassador from Sweden. In 1972, he as a PM compared the US bombing of Hanoi to the bombing of Guernica, and the US froze diplomatic relations with Sweden for a year as punishment.
Norway itself saw a spate of people imprisoned for refusing conscription citing Norwegian NATO membership and the US war in Vietnam (I have an uncle that was in prison for that; my dad was also imprisoned for refusing conscription in part because of the past Norwegian attitudes to the Vietnam war, though his case happened after the war had ended - it took years before the Vietnam wars effect refusing conscription subsided)
It's easy to stand up for free speech when it involves something this old. It's far harder to stand up for it when it is happening.
#2 - The process is broken. I'd naively suggest decentralization as a solution (yeah, I know it worked great for Diaspora..).
Consider this: what if it was the only copy of this picture? What about the smaller publishers that can't easily build media uproar? Could we ever end up with this kind of "mistakes" happening automatically thanks to AI algorithms?
Whether one believes #3 is orthogonal to whether one believes #1 or #2 (or perhaps some other alternative to those two), they are beliefs about different attributes of the affair.
"Objective" and "political" are not opposites. Whether I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream is both completely subjective and completely apolitical, and I'm sure there are plenty of politics involved in math and physics research (the most "objective" things I can think of).
1. The process worked. Facebook looked it over, reasoned about it, and changed their minds. Kudos to them for admitting a mistake.
2. It took a media uproar to make a change like this. The process is broken. There has to be a better way to make these changes.
3. There was no right objective answer in the first place, so the process is inherently political.
I am leaning towards #3. Want to know what the HN community thinks.