Facebook says it has a policy letting any person initiate a takedown of a post containing an image of their residence, regardless of the post's newsworthiness
just very bad ones.” Pretty accurate! To be fair, people WANT Facebook to exercise judgment, except when they DON'T want Facebook to exercise judgment. Doing nothing is also judgment. https://twitter.com/... Nellie Bowles / @nelliebowles : The answer of course is that most people are totally comfortable with techno authoritarianism as long as the enforcers agree with their politics https://twitter.com/... @azi : “When Lachlan Murdoch, the co-chairman of @nypost's parent company, bought the most expensive house in Los Angeles, for instance, it received wide & occasionally sneering coverage. Maybe Mr. Murdoch didnt know he could get the stories deleted by Facebook.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Josh Kraushaar / @hotlinejosh : “Facebook's usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Seamus Hughes / @seamushughes : TLDR: @benyt has been doxing people for years without knowing it wasn't cool. https://www.nytimes.com/... Kim-Mai Cutler / @kimmaicutler : I think ... not enabling mass viral distribution of someone's private primary home address is ... a good idea? https://twitter.com/... Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis : Well, there's another way to position this: Facebook is making judgments about Murdoch's unjournalism while journalism refuses to clean its own house of him. https://www.nytimes.com/... Zephyr Teachout / @zephyrteachout : Zuckerberg is the Editor in Chief of All News, making all decisions about what is newsworthy and how to balance privacy interests and importance, and other awful results of gross monopoly power. https://www.nytimes.com/... Rasmus Kleis Nielsen / @rasmus_kleis : On policy issues “devoted to privacy and safety, Facebook doesn't pay any special deference to journalists and believes its “policy” team is better suited to make decisions. Facebook alone will balance competing values like newsworthiness against privacy” https://www.nytimes.com/... Andr Picard / @picardonhealth : .@Facebook's rolling standoff with #journalism. In cases of difficult news judgment, who decides what counts as news? The answer is simple: Facebook alone decides, by @benyt https://www.nytimes.com/... via @nytimes #SoMe Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Two ways to fix this: 1) Create the conditions for more competition online, including much stronger antitrust enforcement. 2) Regulate speech — that is, have government regulate speech. I pick the first one. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's discretion over what stays up has been the company's longest-running controversy: the manifesto era made its power to judge speech explicit, and later attempts to formalize judgment — like the news trust-ranking surveys — drew demands for transparency about who gets ranked and why. The residence-image policy is the opposite move: rather than exercising judgment about newsworthiness per post, Facebook is removing the judgment call entirely and giving any person a categorical veto over images of their own home.
That choice lands directly on journalism, which is exactly the constituency already at war with the platform: reporters have documented Facebook lying on the record and ghost-writing op-eds during coverage, and the commentary around this policy cites the wide, sometimes sneering coverage of Lachlan Murdoch buying Los Angeles's most expensive house as the kind of story a no-newsworthiness-exception rule would erase.
First-order effects
- News organizations lose the ability to publish photos of private residences attached to reported stories about their owners — the Murdoch-house coverage named by commentators is the template of what becomes unpostable, and outlets must now route such reporting through Facebook's takedown-request system or avoid the imagery.
- Any Facebook user gains a unilateral removal lever over posts containing their home's image, shifting moderation workload onto an appeals flow that runs regardless of whether the post was journalistically significant.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms face a forced choice between matching Facebook's categorical privacy rule — standardizing across social media where homes can be shown — or defending their own newsworthiness exceptions and becoming the destination for the reporting Facebook now suppresses.
- The policy deepens the value gap between platforms and publishers just as Australian and French regulators push to make tech companies pay for news: Facebook would be simultaneously asked to fund journalism whose most sensitive visual material it refuses to carry.
Third-order effects
- If categorical opt-out rules spread, platform governance shifts from per-post editorial judgment toward default permission boundaries set by subjects of coverage rather than publishers — a structure where 'newsworthy' stops being an input at all, and press norms are renegotiated one policy setting at a time.
- The pattern points toward regulation of these boundaries becoming unavoidable: once takedown rights are granted categorically, lawmakers and press-freedom advocates will press for symmetric guarantees that journalistic uses survive the request queue.
The trend: Platforms are replacing discretionary newsworthiness judgments with categorical user-controlled takedown rules, trading editorial flexibility for predictable privacy enforcement at journalism's expense.