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That’s an ad for car insurance that popped up on Facebook the other day. See anything wrong with it? It’s okay, I didn’t notice it at first either but the photo in the ad isn’t a random drivers license picture, instead it’s the face of Mohamed Atta, one of the terrorists who crashed a plane into the Twin Towers on 9/11.
How the hell does this happen? Well no one really knows exactly. The best guess is that InsuranceSavings, the website who posted the ad, was using random images from the wide web of the Internet for their advertisement photos. And knowing how dark and screwy that wide web could be, is it really all that surprising that somebody plastered the face of a terrorist on a driver license? Ugh.
Mohamed Atta was one of the terrorist hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 who piloted the plane to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His stone cold photo had become iconic in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy because it showed the sort of bone chilling mass murderer who was capable of killing thousands of innocent people. How it ended up on Facebook, as an advertisement, is a complete embarrassment to everyone involved and most of all, to Facebook itself. Facebook is notorious for letting third-rate, borderline-spam ads clutter and scar its website. It’s repulsive, really. If Facebook wants to be treated like a big boy company, it should ramp up its ad policies and ban awful ads like this from ever happening again. You’re not MySpace.
The company who posted the ad has pulled Atta’s photo from Facebook and is conducting a full investigation into how this fiasco all happened. I think Facebook should conduct a full investigation too. [Chris Duncan via Copyranter]
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“The company who posted the ad has pulled Atta’s photo from Facebook and is conducting a full investigation into how this fiasco all happened. I think Facebook should conduct a full investigation too.”
What?
Just what?
Why? What does it matter? Yes he did terrible things, but does that mean we have to get into a tizz when his picture appears somewhere?
FFS, grow up. It’s a mistake. This shit happens. No harm has come of it. It’s such a shitty, tiny pixalated photo you can barely even see who it is.
Fair enough that it was a mistake. But it could still be upsetting for some people. People don’t really want a reminder in their everyday life.
So that needs a full enquiry by Facebook?
Come off it.
It’s an advert; there are adverts for cancer, heart disease, stroke, neglected/abused children… and they’re not upsetting to people who have lost someone to that, or are suffering it right now?
The writer needs to get a grip of what is important in real life, this isn’t.
Yeah but those types of adverts are trying to help with the cause. Some people would rather not see the face of someone involved in the loss of relatives and/or friends for no reason. I personally don’t mind though, then again I wasn’t really affected. Plus some people are more sensitive than others, some perhaps too much… To me it’s something they should try not to happen again but if it does, it’s not the worst thing that could happen.
Look on the bright side, it wasn’t an advert for flight insurance.
My guess is that the person making the advert googled along the lines of “drivers license man” or something simple, found the pic, didn’t check who it was and then used it.
Or, maybe there was some weird logic of “well he can’t claim rights to the photo so I can use it”
They probably thought it was easier, definetely no copyroght on this pic and the piece of s**t will never sue or complain.