By Deepa Seetharaman
Two and a half hours after a Minnesota woman live-streamed the
bloodied body of her boyfriend after he was fatally shot by police
during a traffic stop on Wednesday, Facebook Inc. took down the
footage. Last month, however, a live French video of an alleged
terrorist holding a child hostage remained online for 11 hours
before Facebook removed it.
Tech companies, especially Facebook, have been pouring resources
into live video this year, giving users the ability to broadcast
their lives in real time on Facebook and Twitter Inc.'s
Periscope.
Facebook, where users already watch more than 100 million hours
of video daily in their news feeds, is betting that live videos
will get people to come to its site more often and stay there
longer, which would help it boost ad rates.
In addition to clips posted by users, it is paying partners to
produce live video. It has signed nearly 140 deals worth more than
$50 million to media companies and video creators, The Wall Street
Journal reported last month.
Live video, however, is uncharted territory for social-media
sites. In the past year, there have been at least 18 violent acts
-- rapes, killings, suicides -- disseminated on live video. This
material can shine a light on events normally hidden from view, but
also can shock or disturb viewers who have no way of knowing what
is coming.
Facebook's response to such images was tested twice last week:
by the Minnesota video, which was reinstated more than an hour
after being taken down, and the fatal shooting of Dallas police
officers the following day, which was captured on Facebook Live by
a witness.
Facebook added a "graphic content" warning to both videos, which
have generated 5.6 million views each.
"There doesn't seem to be any limit to what can be captured and
what can be shared," said Albert Gidari, director of privacy at
Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society. "There's a
lot of good that can come of that, and a lot of bad."
The inconsistency in how Facebook and other sites are dealing
with violent videos shows the perils of rolling the service out
without the technology or manpower to police it. Facebook said the
Minnesota video was removed because of a "technical glitch," which
it didn't explain. The video was reinstated after users complained
that it showed an important news event.
Facebook and Twitter both have standards that limit what users
can post on their sites involving violence. Both ban any content
that mocks or praises violence, but allow for it in cases in which
the material is newsworthy.
The way social media sites have censored content on their sites
before -- relying mostly on users to flag objectionable posts,
which are then screened by computer programs and human beings --
isn't always sophisticated enough for live video, experts say. They
add that no software exists that can identify violence on streams
without human intervention.
Facebook says it has a team working around the clock to review
videos flagged by users. Twitter's Periscope asks randomly selected
viewers whether comments on live broadcasts that are flagged by
others should be censored.
On Friday, Facebook acknowledged it hasn't mastered monitoring
live video. "Live video on Facebook is a new and growing format,"
the company said in a post. "We've learned a lot over the past few
months, and will continue to make improvements to this experience
wherever we can." One improvement has been its ability to interrupt
a flagged live stream if it violates the company's rules.
Live video, however, poses a particularly tough challenge. It is
hard to tell if a video is going to run afoul of a site's standards
when it is unfolding in real time.
In the French video posted last month, the attacker made
incendiary comments but the video didn't contain any violent
images, said David Thomson, a Paris-based journalist who writes
about jihadism in France. He was able to view the video because he
followed the alleged terrorist on Facebook. He wrote about it in a
series of tweets, after which time Facebook took it down. He didn't
flag it directly to Facebook.
Tech companies are starting to test a more proactive approach to
handling such content. For the past few months,Facebook has been
running an experiment in which it reviews publicly shared live
broadcasts once they have reached a certain number of views or gone
viral, even if there are no complaints. Twitter says Periscope is
working on a tool to automatically monitor live-streamed video
clips for offensive actions or harassment.
The launch of live-video streaming before grasping all the
challenge reflects a Silicon Valley ethos: ship it out and work out
the kinks later.
In May, a few months after Facebook rolled out Facebook Live to
its 1.65 billion monthly users, a 30-year-old Florida man
live-streamed his standoff with police over a court order to
hospitalize him. In a series of nine videos over more than three
hours, the man made threats to police.
"Shoot me," the man, Adam Mayo, screamed at the Tampa, Fla.,
SWAT team in one video. Later, he said, "You're going to witness a
death right now, but I won't be the only one." In the end, he was
hospitalized.
Despite their disturbing nature and the threats, Facebook
determined the videos didn't violate its rules and allowed them to
remain on the site without a warning.
After the Minnesota video appeared, people immediately seized
upon the value of showing the violence. "This kind of real-time
availability of information activated the movement," said Michelle
Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality in
Minneapolis.
--Yoree Koh contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 10, 2016 21:21 ET (01:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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