The spokesman for the Egyptian Army has an official Facebook account. In the last 24 hours or so, they published a series of pictures that show the dismembered and charred bodies of ISIS fighters who were killed in fighting between the Egyptian military and the terrorists. It is extremely graphic and gruesome stuff.
I wonder if the Facebook terms of service actually allow this. Maybe official/government Facebook accounts are exempted from the rules? While it is - and has always been - possible to dig up this kind of material on the Internet if you are looking for it, there is a good chance that unsuspecting Facebook users, including minors, will stumble upon these disturbing images.
No. I rarely use Facebook. The only reason I maintain an account is that I can participate in two special interest discussion groups. Otherwise, I don’t really care. I learned about the Egyptian military Facebook account and the pictures in a news article.
I’d be pretty sure that the 200k that liked it didn’t.
Article 15 of Geneva Convention I prohibits despoiling the dead. Egypt is a signatory. I’m not sure if that piece of the laws of land warfare applies to non-signatories. The line between presenting it as news versus it being despoilment is certainly a subject of debate. I’d assume that Facebook would not want their brand tied to even a debate of potential War Crimes.
The problem on my feed is pictures of mutilated and beaten dogs by “animal lovers” looking for a sympathy share. First time gets the picture removed from my feed, second time it’s the poster I block.
I don’t report photos because that’s not how I roll. Also, I know lots of people who got their accounts suspended by having innocent nipples in their photo somewhere and I think that’s bullshit. If you don’t like it, hide the post or the poster, like me. Don’t go getting someone suspended because you don’t like what they post, it’s easy enough to prevent seeing it ever again.
Although I might be a little harder on the spokesman for the Egyptian Army, posting and bragging about war crime videos. That’s crazy right there.
I’m fairly certain it’s against Facebook’s terms to post “extremely graphic and gruesome stuff”, but Facebook only moderates what is reported, and sometimes slowly. A search of Egyptian Army didn’t turn up an obvious official account, so I can’t tell which account the news article you didn’t bother referencing in your OP is about, but if it’s a much followed and popular account, and the picture is shared often, 200k likes doesn’t seem all that much.
Yeah, I’ve seen some pretty effed up stuff involving animals on FB, myself (my own fault for “liking” certain pages). I don’t report anything. I just click the option that says “I don’t want to see more of this” and that’s usually the end of that. I wish I had the power to stop all the crazy, evil stuff that goes on in the world but since I don’t I’d rather just not see it.
I have to disagree with your characterisation of “extremely graphic”. Gruesome in context, certainly. Knowing they are real dead people being paraded makes it ghoulish. But browsing through them I’ve yet to find one that isn’t “just” a dead body with blood stained clothing.
Using the option to report I find that graphic violence isn’t on the first page of causes to report, you have to first select “other reasons”, and if choosing to report it to facebook you also have the opportunity to read their guidelines, where you also have to go down at least one layer to find something about graphic content:
Now do these pictures celebrate or glorify violence? I don’t read Arabic, so I can’t tell what the picture descriptions and comments contain, but my guess is that Facebook isn’t following their own guidelines here. Also only one of the albums has, at this point, a “this is graphic violence, are you sure you want to see it”-warning, maybe that has the “extremely graphic” content you mentioned and the others are just dead bodies?
I have several FBFs who do that. There were also several people who posted extremely graphic pictures of Boston Marathon bombing victims.
There’s also a person I blocked for spamming my feed with several dozen anti-Obama memes every day (We get it. Really. WE.GET.IT) and another site that I blocked because it displayed all these t-shirts that said, in so many words, “The world revolves around me because I have an autistic child, and don’t you forget it.”
After the second sunday morning in a row where my wife checked FB and saw a video posted of people accused of being witches being beaten by mobs and then set on fire using burning tires she swore off FB on the weekends.
Dog lovers would also post disgusting phone cam vids of bestiality, saying poor animal this is so sick look at this. Most people would rather not.
In reviewing the photos, I also found them to be rather benign, by comparison to what many combat casualties actually look like. Due to much of what people have mentioned here I’m finding FB to have diminishing value to me.
Click on the thing in the right hand corner and tell Facebook you don’t want to see stuff like that anymore. Do it a few times, and you probably won’t. It will also let you hide things by account or by page.
