French Killer’s Video: Facebook Grapples With ‘Live’ Abuse

The incident highlights the challenges companies offering live streaming videos face, as they cater to millions.

This is a still taken from a video released on 14 June 2015 by ISIS’ Amaq news agency showing Larossi Abballa, the suspect in the i French police couple knifing case, confessing to the killings. (Photo: AP)

After Larossi Abballa killed a French police commander and the commander’s partner on Tuesday, he took to Facebook Live to encourage viewers in a 12-minute video to follow his example: Kill prison staff, police officials, journalists, lawmakers.

The incident underscores the immense challenges companies such as Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and Google’s YouTube face as they push live video streaming to hundreds of millions of people.

Facebook in recent months has made its Live feature - which allows anyone to broadcast a video in real time - a central component of its strategy. Twitter, similarly, is focused on live content, and online video leader YouTube is also moving into live streaming.

All the companies have protocols in place to remove content that violates their terms of service, mainly by asking users to report offending material for review. But the companies generally promise a turnaround time of 24 hours on such reports, while live videos would have to be reviewed and removed in minutes to prevent wide dissemination.

We do understand and recognize that there are unique challenges when it comes to content and safety for Live videos, We’re deeply committed to improving the effectiveness of how we handle reports of live content that violates our Community Standards.

Facebook spokeswoman

Facebook is not the first company to grapple with abuse of live video. In April, an 18-year-old woman was charged after she livestreamed her friend’s rape on Twitter’s Periscope. In May, a young woman in France recorded herself on Periscope as she threw herself under a train.

Making these decisions for live video broadcasts is even more challenging, Companies already face difficult content takedown decisions related to other types of user-generated content.

Aaron Altschuler, Lawyer, ZwillGen and Former Associate General Counsel for Global Law Enforcement and Security, Yahoo

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. YouTube said it has teams around the world that review reported videos 24 hours a day, adding that it will terminate an account when it has reasonable belief that the person behind it is part of group that the US government has identified as a “foreign terrorist organisation.”

Facebook, which receives millions of reports a week of standards violations, said it reviews the vast majority within 24 hours. It said it is expanding a team dedicated to reviewing live content and staffing it 24 hours a day. Facebook can interrupt and remove broadcasts that violate policy.

The company said it is also testing the monitoring of broadcasts that go viral or are trending even before they are reported. That could give Facebook a way to stop offending broadcasts quickly, just as a television network might.

(This article has been published in arrangement with Reuters.)