In Memphis a 19-year-old boy, Ezekiel D. Kelly, walked into an auto parts store and opened fire, killing four people. As she shot, Kelly filmed everything with her smartphone. And he broadcast his murders on him Facebooklive.
Facebook, which is working on this case together with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorisman independent organization created in 2017 together with Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube, said they had removed Kelly’s Live even before the Memphis police issued a public alert.
Despite this, some Facebook users may have come across the dramatic live images. We do not yet know how many, to establish it we will need an investigation of the social network. Like the one carried out in 2019, following a similar episode. At the time, 28-year-old Brenton Harrison Tarrant streamed the opening part of his live on Facebook attack on two mosquesin Christchurch in New Zealand, which caused the death of 51 people. Tarrant’s live stream, on that occasion, was watched by 200 people.
And therefore we ask ourselves: Is it possible that Facebook is still unable to prevent brutal murders from being broadcast live?
The matter is very complicated. And it certainly implies the means of Zuckerberg’s social network, but also the civic sense of its users.
Let’s start from responsibility of Facebook. Moderating a live broadcast is very different from checking the content of a video on the platform. When a user loads a pre-recorded moviealgorithms come into play that prevent – if the content breaks the social guidelines – completion of the upload.
A direct one, on the other hand, involves a more complicated analysis of the images. Since the Christchurch bombing, a lot has changed and now Facebook also uses artificial intelligence to monitor live streamsconstantly training the algorithm to recognize violent situations or cases of potential suicides.
AI training also happens through images provided by the London Police, which shoots and transmits the videos of the training of their agents to the social network. IS a technology that runs in the backgroundand which joins in the eyes of a global team, made up of real-life employees, who monitors content “4 hours a day, seven days a week”.
But it is obvious that something can escape the meshes of the algorithm and at the sight of the moderators. As big as the Facebook team is, it cannot cope with the millions of users who, at any moment, they can turn into broadcasters.
Facebook writes that, in general, it monitors and moderates “broadcasts that reach a certain level of popularity (without specifying the number of spectators that determines it, ed) and that enter the trends “. If you think about the Christchurch live broadcast, in 2019, and his own 200 spectatorsyou immediately realize that this kind of Live, especially if started by anonymous users, perhaps with a few ‘friends’, can hardly attract a large number of users in the short term.
But then artificial intelligence is not effective enough? The truth lies somewhere in between. AI, not just that of Facebook, mind you, can be wrong. But mostly he is unable to predict a user’s behavior. Could the algorithm turn off the live broadcast as soon as it identifies a gun? How can he understand that this is true? How can he know how it will be used? All of this in the country where 357 million weapons are in circulation. Unlike the speech of pre-recorded content, which the software can analyze in its entirety while loading.
And we come, instead, to ‘responsibility’ of users, their sensitivity and their civic sense. Facebook streams are subject to same guidelines that the posts must respect. Live, therefore, can be reported by connected users if they break the rules. In this case, Facebook can act more quickly for the interruption of the transmission.
Of course, a lot depends also from the duration of the live broadcast. If this is very rapid, of a few minutes, it is possible that the reporting is not sufficient and that a murder is consumed before the social network can intervene. But if the Live is longer, and the images right away explicit, an immediate report can help. It is true that users are not required to do the job of moderatorsbut it is surprising that the first report concerning the Christchurch bombing, for example, occurred only 29 minutes after the start of the live stream.