Any centralized social network is subject to moderation because if it's centralized, it can be attacked, fined or shut down by a court. So facebook can't escape that rule and must decide what is acceptable or not and have to anticipate any flak they can get.
In the end, moderation is a gruesome job and nobody really wants to do it, and it will be subject to how moderators anticipate public perception, so it's a PR race.
So of course you will have those situations where facebook will make bad choices, but it doesn't only depends on their moderation team, it also depends on political correctness. That's why decentralized networks are better, because nobody is really responsible, and it can hardly be attacked.
You can decide to either have a politically correct website and get investments, or disagree with political correctness and be like 4chan.
It's not great, I'm sure people realize that, and that the internet will go back to decentralized systems.
That's a false dichotomy, especially since they're getting more flak for deleting the controversial photo than they would have for removing it. It's pretty easy to distinguish between a historically significant photo, to keep, and 4chan-style offensive trolling, to delete. There is a gray area, but this was clearly on the right side of it.
This particular picture was on the cover of the New York Times. Surely a human reviewer from Facebook must consider this as reason enough to revert the censorship?
Sadly, the human reviewer at Facebook is quite likely to not have even been alive in 1972 (or not old enough to even remember the photo) and so it is likely they are just following the "official facebook policy" without thinking, and thereby hitting the "censor" button.
Note - this does not excuse their actions, but may put some context around 'why' it is happening.
I think facebook use bots at one point or another, who automatically moderate thing. The crux of the problem is how users do try to dispute a moderation, and if facebook really bothers to validate automated moderation.
Just imagine the quantity of content passing through facebook, and imagine the amount of people required to review all those report that comes in. I'm sure they off loaded a big chunk of it towards some sort of AI.
In the end, moderation is a gruesome job and nobody really wants to do it, and it will be subject to how moderators anticipate public perception, so it's a PR race.
So of course you will have those situations where facebook will make bad choices, but it doesn't only depends on their moderation team, it also depends on political correctness. That's why decentralized networks are better, because nobody is really responsible, and it can hardly be attacked.
You can decide to either have a politically correct website and get investments, or disagree with political correctness and be like 4chan.
It's not great, I'm sure people realize that, and that the internet will go back to decentralized systems.