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Facebook tightens live-streaming in crackdown on violence
SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Facebook announced Wednesday it is
tightening access to livestreaming to prevent the rampant sharing of graphic
video as took place with the Christchurch massacre.
People who have broken certain rules, including those against “dangerous
organizations and individuals,” will be restricted from using the Facebook
Live streaming feature, said vice president of integrity Guy Rosen.
“Following the horrific recent terrorist attacks in New Zealand, we’ve been
reviewing what more we can do to limit our services from being used to cause
harm or spread hate,” Rosen said in a statement.
A “one-strike” policy at Facebook Live will be applied to a broader range
of offenses, with those who violate serious policies suspended from using the
feature after a single offense.
Such offenses would include sharing a link to a statement from a terrorist
group with no context, according to Rosen.
“We plan on extending these restrictions to other areas over the coming
weeks, beginning with preventing those same people from creating ads on
Facebook,” Rosen said.
He added that technical innovation is needed to get ahead of the kind of
“adversarial media manipulation” seen after the New Zealand mosque massacre,
such as users modifying videos in order to slip past filters.
“One of the challenges we faced in the days after the attack was a
proliferation of many different variants of the video of the attack,” Rosen
said.
“People — not always intentionally — shared edited versions of the video
which made it hard for our systems to detect.”
Facebook announced that it was putting $7.5 million into research
partnerships with three US universities to improve image and video analysis
technology.
“This work will be critical for our broader efforts against manipulated
media, including deepfakes,” Rosen said, a reference to videos altered using
artificial intelligence.
“We hope it will also help us to more effectively fight organized bad
actors who try to outwit our systems as we saw happen after the Christchurch
attack.”
The news came as New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was set to
join other world leaders in launching a “Christchurch call” to curb online
extremism at an international meeting in Paris on Wednesday.
The move was prompted by the massacre in March at two Christchurch mosques
by a self-described white supremacist, who broadcast live footage on Facebook
from a head-mounted camera as he gunned down 51 people.
Top executives from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Twitter were also set to
attend, though Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was to be represented by another
executive from the social media giant.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0918 hrs