Facebook, Under Pressure Over Terrorist Content, Restricts Live Streaming

By Sam Schechner

PARIS -- Facebook Inc. said it would stop people who have recently posted terrorist propaganda from broadcasting live video on its service, the company's most concrete response so far to pressure to dial back the feature after it was used to broadcast the deadly attack on 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company said that it will impose a "one-strike" rule that will block people who have violated certain Facebook rules, including its restrictions on posting terrorist content, from using the company's live-video streaming feature to broadcast to anyone else on Facebook for a limited time, for instance 30 days.

"Following the horrific 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," Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president for integrity, said in a blog post.

The change comes ahead of a summit in Paris on Wednesday in which companies including Facebook and Alphabet Inc.'s Google -- owner of YouTube -- are set to join several countries including France, New Zealand, the U.K., and Jordan in what is called the "Christchurch Call".

An early draft of the call, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, includes a specific commitment from social-media companies to implement immediate measures to reduce the risk that anyone can use live-streaming to broadcast extremist content.

Facebook's move follows another by YouTube to restrict its live-streaming feature to users that have more than 1,000 users. Live video has been a specific focus of concern because of several recent incidents in which disturbing or extremist content has been broadcast live. Tech companies say that it is more difficult for them to detect what is going on in live streams than still images or video that has been previously recorded.

Tech companies are under growing pressure on a number of fronts. The European Union has one of the world's most comprehensive privacy laws and recently passed a copyright directive that imposes new restrictions and obligations on big internet companies. After several investigations into whether tech giants are violating competition rules, some politicians and others are calling for them to be broken up. And a number of countries -- most recently France -- have proposed tough new rules to oversee divisive questions of how social-media firms should police hate speech and cyberbullying on their platforms.

Terrorist content -- including propaganda, recruitment videos and material depicting attacks -- has been less controversial because it is easier to draw a line around what should be removed. Facebook and Google both have automated tools to detect Islamic State content, for instance. Nevertheless, tech companies are under pressure to do more to remove that content more quickly, at the EU the G-7 and other international venues.

The Christchurch Call is a joint venture of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern following the mosque attacks in her country in March and French President Emmanuel Macron, who added it to a broader summit with tech executives he is hosting on Wednesday. Organizers have met with experts on multiple continents to hone the four-page voluntary call to come up with commitments on how to limit the spread of terror content.

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 15, 2019 03:54 ET (07:54 GMT)

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024