First Napalm Girl, Now Rosa Parks Facebook Censors Iconic Civil Rights PhotoBy Jay Syrmopoulos The historic picture of Rosa Parks being booked into jail in 1955, after being arrested for her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, was deemed by the social media giant as violating the Facebook Community Standards. The iconic photos had been posted by an individual in response to a Facebook post by the Van Zandt County Sheriffs Department announcing a recent raid on a cannabis growing operation. This recent censorship comes on the heels of Facebook being publicly humiliated after being exposed by the Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, for deleting the iconic Vietnam photo of Napalm Girl from a host of the social networks pages following its publication in the Aftenposten newspaper. The blatant censorship outraged users, who proceeded to post the Napalm Girl photo on their pages, with those images also being deleted. On September 9, Aftenposten printed a public letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks CEO, urging the social network to allow the photos publication. Facebook eventually reversed its decision, acknowledging the historical significance of the image, and attempted to blame it on their recent algorithm changes the common refrain from the company when caught doing something irresponsible or potentially even dubious. Interestingly, the same cannot be said of the Rosa Parks photo, as the individual who uploaded the photo, who chose to not be identified, stated that they had posted the photo numerous places within the thread and that not all of them had been taken down indicating that the censorship was not algorithm based, and more more likely due to human intervention. This debate is about more than this one picture, and more than just Facebook as a network, Solberg wrote in a Facebook post. It is about the responsibilities large media institutions and platforms have to not pervert or distort reality. The idea that such historic photos could be simply deleted without any recourse shows the extreme power Facebook wields in controlling what people do and dont see, thus think. From outright banning of some material, to soft-censoring other content by intentionally ranking it lower in the algorithm as to ensure very few people actually view a given work the social media giant has uncanny influence on peoples perceptions. Additionally, as we exclusively reported, Facebook has been caught manipulating their trending section in an effort to boost Hillarys faltering candidacy. The recent news that Facebook has worked closely with the Israeli government to censor material the state considers offensive and takes down 95 percent of material flagged by the Israelis should raise serious red flags that what was once a social media company has now become a social engineering company. Please share this story to help more people understand how Facebook is working to control peoples perceptions! Jay Syrmopoulos writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared. All of social media is a joke, a mind changer if you will. I shared this story. And I have friends living all over the world, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, The UK and Ireland, just to name a few and they have asked me to stop posting gruesome videos or photos of children being hurt. They are sickened by it and yes they dont want to see it in their news feeds. Does that keep me from speaking up and figuring out a way to talk about it, and remind them they have choices to make about this election, making marijuana and hemp growing legal is only one of them. Keep working, and talking about this though. I am not afraid to see it, I am not turning my head away, or buying it in the sand. I am staying focused and trying to organize for the greater good. Thank you for sharing this article. 