Zuckerberg seems to recognize that Facebook could be more of a hotbed for citizen journalism, just as Twitter has been since the Arab Spring protests in 2011.
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A live, 10-minute video of the aftermath of a police officer shooting a black man in Minnesota was the latest example of the riveting power of video streaming and the complex ethical and policy issues it raises for Facebook Live and similar features.
“Instead, Facebook asks that users report the video as violent, or with any of the other options”. And because there are more phones in more hands now, there are more camera angles to choose from.
In April, an 18-year-old woman was charged after she live streamed her friend’s rape on Twitter’s Periscope. As Facebook has learned in the past week, however, that status comes with unique challenges.
It has been a huge internal priority for the company.
Now the live videos commanding the most attention are far from mundane-and the social-media giant is struggling with how to handle its position in the middle of disturbing news events.
The function was obviously never promoted as a tool for police accountability or eyewitness coverage of a shooting rampage. There was a stream of baby bald eagles and a guy who went live while he got a haircut. Help relatives virtually attend a wedding…
But the same technology that live-streams joy can also stream death and heartbreak.
What would you tell Mark Zuckerberg and the people running Facebook?
Videos of events like the shootings in Dallas or the death of Philando Castile would be unacceptable on an entertainment website, and perhaps in Facebook’s original iteration, they would have been altogether prohibited.
“The images we’ve seen this week are graphic and heartbreaking, and they shine a light on the fear that millions of members of our community live with every day”, he wrote. The video went viral until Facebook pulled down the video for undisclosed reasons.
Facebook also put a warning on the video and marked it as disturbing. Several times, Facebook has blocked political or newsworthy content only to later say that the removal was a “technical glitch” or an “error”. Are you sure you want to see this?’ The mundane could become the suspenseful, Zuckerberg said, because viewers wouldn’t know what would happen next. In Facebook’s most recent quarterly earnings, it reported a 50 percent surge in revenue, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its promotion of live video won new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to increase spending.
Over the past decade, Facebook has grown from a Friendster-like entertainment platform for sharing thoughts socially with friends into a mechanism for sharing news articles and opinion posts. Last month, a Chicago man live streamed his own murder. If not, who’s in charge of halting the stream? “We have a team on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, dedicated to responding to these reports immediately”.
“There have been 560 police killings this year already, including 16 in July, but the nation is talking about Castile and Sterling because of the videos”, Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, said in an email. Hundreds of millions of Facebook users with cellphones equals hundreds of millions of potential cameramen and camerawomen.
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In many instances this mysterious process removes content many users would indeed find objectionable – pornography, harassing or racist material – but it is just as capable of removing sensitive content like the Castile video that the public has a right to see.
