Facebook chief Sandberg sorry for removing ‘napalm girl’ photo

The chief operating officer of Facebook has apologized to Norway’s prime minister for deleting an iconic photograph of a naked girl running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.

Sheryl Sandberg said “we don’t always get it right” in a letter to Prime Minister Erna Solberg. The social media firm has already said it would review its mechanisms to allow sharing of the image in the future.

Facebook decided to reinstate the photograph, named “The Terror of War,” on Friday after the editor of a Norwegian website accused the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of "abusing your power" after the site removed a post of the photo by Tom Egeland, a Norwegian writer.  Facebook also deleted a subsequent post by Solberg expressing support for Egeland.

The 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, by Nick Ut, shows Kim Phuc, 9, running naked and crying after her clothes and layers of skin melted away after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong fighters in South Vietnam.

In the letter, Sandberg said that historical importance “sometimes … outweighs the importance of keeping nudity off Facebook.”

Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard