What is your major malfunction, Amazon?

If you were looking for Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War film “Full Metal Jacket” on Amazon Prime Video in the past week, you might have noticed something amiss. Philip Castle’s iconic movie poster, which features an army helmet with a peace button and the slogan, “Born to Kill,” scrawled in black ink, was altered to remove the text.

Matthew Modine — who starred as U.S. Marine Private “Joker” in the film — tweeted about the incident, racking up thousands of reposts on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter:

Who decided to remove ‘BORN TO KILL?’ They not only defaced an iconic piece of art by Philip Castle, but they completely missed the point it was there for. Pvt. Joker has the helmet with ‘BORN TO KILL’ and the peace button as a statement about ‘the duality of man.’

As Modine highlighted, the “Born to Kill” motto, juxtaposed with the peace sign, gets at what Private Joker calls “the Jungian thing” — the ego and the shadow, to satirize action movies’ usual simple-mindedness about violence. 

In the movie, “Born to Kill” isn’t a straightforward endorsement of violence, but part of a clever set of tensions that Stanley Kubrick employs to present violence in a more complex way than “us versus them” morality suggests. Following public outrage over the alteration of the movie poster, Amazon reversed course, replacing the sanitized design with a film still that includes the original helmet, “Born to Kill” and all. 

Some have opined that the “Born to Kill” text was removed to comply with design rules rather than its perceived viewpoint, since “many platforms have rules against written text on the main background graphic.” Others might not think it is a big deal for one movie poster to have its text removed.

Yet Amazon’s about-face follows a familiar pattern, where a tech platform’s algorithms or policies lead to removals or alterations of an artistic design which betray the integrity of the artist’s vision and are only able to be reversed following public scrutiny.

Amazon’s bowdlerization of Philip Castle’s “Full Metal Jacket” poster recalls Facebook’s infamous reversal after removing Nick Ut's Pulitzer-Prize-winning black and white photo, “The Terror of War,” which depicted a young, naked girl running away from a Napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Changes to Facebook’s content moderation policies didn’t come until the company deleted Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s post sharing the image, resulting in public indignation and a statement from Kim Phúc, the woman depicted as a girl fleeing violence in the photo.

Private content moderation decisions, even unwise ones, are a protected exercise of editorial discretion under the First Amendment. Yet social media platforms and content distributors like Amazon could do more to foster a culture of free expression, especially given that they often gesture toward the importance of free speech principles and have significant influence over the flow of information and creative content in the digital age. There is a difference between what private social media companies can do, legally, and what they should do, if they want to promote freedom of expression. 

Last week’s “Full Metal Jacket” incident underscores the prevalence of restrictions on artistic expression on tech platforms. In this case, the subject was violence, but it is often nudity, as highlighted in a May 2024 study on “algorithmic censorship” presented by ELLIS Alicante at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. When tech platforms set overbroad and often-automated content-moderation policies without regard to their impact on art, it results in content removal and shadow-bans that are inconsistent with a broad conception of human creativity and freedom of expression, casting a chilling effect over the internet.

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These days “Full Metal Jacket” could be canceled for any number of reasons. Its script includes slurs, and the characters engage in racist, homophobic, and misogynistic behavior. But to censor it for these reasons would be to profoundly misunderstand its message: Stanley Kubrick’s film is designed precisely to shed light on humanity’s flaws. “Full Metal Jacket” re-sensitizes viewers to violence and captures the human brutalities of war in a visceral way. Censoring its “Born to Kill” slogan blunts the force of its biting social criticism. 

Art is a mirror. It does not necessarily endorse the subjects or themes it explores, but rather exists to illuminate our world and provide us greater understanding of it — and not just the pretty, pleasant parts. From Greek tragedies to Bret Easton Ellis novels, violence and taboos have always been a vital source of artistic inspiration. Stanley Kubrick’s film and similar artwork can open audiences’ eyes to “the duality of man” — if we let it.