Facebook says no one flagged NZ mosque shooting livestream on WTOP| LONDON (AP) \u2014 Facebook says none of the 200 or so people who watched live video of the New Zealand mosque shooting flagged it to moderators, underlining the challenge tech companies face in policing violent or disturbing content in\u2026<\/b>
\nLONDON (AP) \u2014 Why did Facebook air live video of the New Zealand mosque shooting for 17 minutes? Didn\u2019t anyone alert the company while it was happening?
Facebook says no. According to its deputy general counsel, Chris Sonderby, none of the 200 or so people who watched the live video flagged it to moderators. In a Tuesday blog post, Sonderby said the first user report didn\u2019t come until 12 minutes after the broadcast ended.
All of which raises additional questions \u2014 among them, why so many people watched without saying anything, whether Facebook relies too much on outsiders and machines to report trouble, and whether users and law enforcement officials even know how to reach Facebook with concerns about what they\u2019re seeing on the service.
\u201cWhen we see things through our phones, we imagine that they are like a television show,\u201d said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. \u201cThey are at a distance, and we have no power.\u201d
Facebook said it removed the video \u201cwithin minutes\u201d of being notified by New Zealand police. But since then, Facebook and other social media companies have had to contend with copies posted by others.
The shooting suspect carefully modeled his attack for an internet age, as he live-streamed the killing of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tim Cigelske, who teaches about social media at Marquette University in Milwaukee, said that while viewers have the same moral obligations to help as a bystander does in the physical world, people don\u2019t necessarily know what to do.
\u201cIt\u2019s like calling 911 in an emergency,\u201d he said. \u201cWe had to train people and make it easy for them. You have to train people in a new way if you see an emergency happening not in person but online.\u201d
To report live video, a user must know to click on a small set of three gray dots on the right side of the post. A user who clicks on \u201creport live video\u201d gets a choice of objectionable content types to select from, including violence, bullying and harassment. Users are also told to contact law enforcement if someone is in immediate danger.
Facebook also doesn\u2019t appear to post any public information instructing law enforcement how to report dangerous or criminal video. The company does have a page titled \u201cinformation for law enforcement authorities,\u201d but it merely outlines procedures for making legal requests for user account records. Facebook didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment and questions about its communications with police.
Facebook uses artificial intelligence to detect objectionable material, while relying on the public to flag content that violates its standards. Those reports are then sent to human reviewers, the company said in a November video.
The video also outlined how it uses \u201ccomputer vision\u201d to detect 97 percent of graphic violence before anyone reports it. However, it\u2019s less clear how these systems apply to Facebook\u2019s live streaming.
Experts say live video poses unique challenges, and complaints about live streaming suicides, murders and beatings regularly come up. Nonetheless, they say Facebook cannot deflect responsibility.
\u201cIf they cannot handle the responsibility, then it\u2019s their fault for continuing to provide that service,\u201d said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami.
She calls it \u201cincredibly offensive and inappropriate\u201d to pin responsibility on users subjected to traumatic video.
In some cases, it\u2019s not clear at the outset whether a video or other post violates Facebook\u2019s standards, especially on a service with a range of languages and cultural norms. Indecision didn\u2019t seem to be the case here, though. Facebook simply didn\u2019t know about it in time.
Facebook\u2019s Sonderby said in Tuesday\u2019s blog post that the company \u201cdesignated both shootings as terror attacks, meaning that any praise, support and representation of the events\u201d are violations.
Vaidhyanathan said Facebook\u2019s live video feature has turned into a beast that Facebook can do little about \u201cshort of flipping the switch.\u201d Though Facebook has hired more moderators to supplement its machine detection and user reports, \u201cyou cannot hire enough people\u201d to police a service with 2.3 billion users.
\u201cPeople will always find new ways to express hatred and instigate violence,\u201d he said.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern expressed frustration that the footage remained online four days after the massacre.
Machines can detect when users try to repost banned videos by matching patterns, or digital fingerprints, in the files. But users determined to get around these checks can make small alterations, such as tweaking the color or the video speed.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group of global internet companies led by Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter, said it has identified 800 different versions and added them to a shared database used to block violent terrorist images and videos.
Sonderby said some variants are tough to detect and that Facebook has \u201cexpanded to additional detection systems including the use of audio technology.\u201d
In a series of tweets a day after the shootings, Facebook\u2019s former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, laid out the challenge for tech companies as they raced to keep up with new versions of the video.
\u201cWhat you are seeing on the major platforms is the water leaking around thousands of fingers poked in a dam,\u201d he said.
Stamos estimated the big tech companies are blocking more than 99 percent of the videos from being uploaded, \u201cwhich is not enough to make it impossible to find.\u201d
___
Jesdanun reported from New York.
Copyright \u00a9 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
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