Facebook Restricts Live Streaming--Update
May 15 2019 - 5:17AM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner
PARIS -- Facebook Inc. said it would stop people who have
recently posted or shared 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 without context, 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.
A Facebook spokesperson said such a restriction would have
prevented the alleged shooter from using his Facebook account to
live stream the attack on two mosques in Christchurch in March.
Still, critics said Facebook's new policy isn't sufficient to
prevent bad actors from live streaming violence on its
platform.
"The strong feeling in New Zealand is 'This is not good
enough'," said Alistair Knott, an associate professor of computer
science at the University of Otago. "Even if you've been bad and
you're on some list, you can just get another Facebook account,
it's the easiest thing in the world."
Mr. Knott said that a policy that required Facebook users to
apply for a license to post live video would be more effective at
screening out those interested in live streaming violence.
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.
-- Jon Emont in Hong Kong contributed to this article
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 15, 2019 05:02 ET (09:02 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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