JWH

Facebook has rules that bar precisely these kinds of pictures, but they generally are enforced only when members complain about them, not through advance screening done by the company. Photos come in by the millions every month; Facebook says its users share 30 billion pieces of content every month. They also grant the company nearly unlimited rights to use that data any way it wants.

From an article about an EMT who posted a victim’s corpse on Facebook. The company removed it, obviously, but presumably it passed by the eyes of at least one screener during the deletion process.

How long can people stand to do this? And do they get counseling? Same question for screeners at YouTube, Flickr. (And good God, 4Chan.)

via 

So this letter/piece is being passed around as a story about how a British tabloid writer is resigning from his post over baseless anti-Islam content published by his paper. I mean, that is what it is, so, ok!

But the letter spends more time describing the brazenly cynical way in which these papers create content: 

Daily Star favourite Kelly Brook recently said in an interview: “I do Google myself. Not that often, though, and the stories are always rubbish. “There was a story that I’d seen a hypnotherapist to help me cut down on the time I take to get ready to go out. Where do they get it from?”

Maybe I should answer that one. I made it up. Not that it was my choice; I was told to. At 6pm and staring at a blank page I simply plucked it from my arse. Not that it was all bad. I pocketed a £150 bonus.

You may have read some of my other earth-shattering exclusives. ‘Michael Jackson to attend Jade Goody’s funeral’. (He didn’t.) ‘Robbie pops ‘pill at heroes concert’. (He didn’t either.) ‘Matt Lucas on suicide watch’. (He wasn’t.) ‘Jordan turns to Buddha.’ (She might have, but I doubt it.)

Uni friends who’ve snagged jobs at or adjacent to the British tabs have described this culture to me before, and it’s always fascinating. And while it may be an open secret, Peppiatt’s willingness to recount his involvement in detail makes for good (but queasy!) reading.

Anyway, it’s the fluidity of the decision-making process that elevates this from distasteful to nauseating: The choice between fabricating a story about a c-tier celebrity and extending an unnecessary  pinch to an entire country’s already irritated MOSLEM nerve is basically thoughtless. The celebrity has entered into an informal agreement to trade fame for public flagellation. All British Muslims, not so much. 

Also, there’s that thing written in invisible ink between every line in the piece, which can only be read if you have a spray bottle full of lemon juice OR any experience working at any American web or print publication: It happens here too. 

So I finally got around to reading Joel Johnson’s Wired cover story on Foxconn. It’s thorough and important, but I’m not surprised at the pushback. 

The only thing I took issue with, really, was the packaging. Suicide was a consistent thread in the article, but, contrary to the suggestion of the cover splash, I don’t think the primary purpose of the piece was to map or somehow quantify a causal link between an iPhone purchase and a Foxconn employee suicide. That said, I don’t think it’s fair to expect readers to separate the choices of designers, editors and writers in everything they read. It’s Wired’s responsibility to make sure the final product isn’t discordant. And who knows anyway! I can’t presume to know the intentions of anyone involved in the article’s production.

Mainly, I read the piece as a queasy account of the larger relationship between those who manufacture and those who consume. It’s an uncomfortable relationship, as it always has been, which probably helps to explain why readers have been so touchy about the story.

So to try to stake the piece’s credibility on Foxconn’s relative suicide rate, as many have, smells of rationalization. (I should know—I’ve engaged in more or less the same thing.) Doing frantic napkin arithmetic in a race to discredit the premise of the piece isn’t just an injustice to statistics, it conveys an underlying need to discredit the premise in the first place. It’s the same broken impulse—though perhaps a bit fainter—that leads people to blurt out, after being shown a photo of an emaciated, shoeless worker sewing together $150 sneakers, “well, if it weren’t for this job, he wouldn’t have anything.” 

The only way to deal with this guilt is to resist the urge to banish it. You’re not doing yourself any favors by writing off one of modernity’s most important questions with a few clicks on your MacBook’s calculator, or by blurting a few recycled Thomas Friedman quotes into a comment form.