FACEBOOK CURBS LIVESTREAMING FEATURE

Social media giant tightens rules after Christchurch massacre video

FACEBOOK announced yesterday it would tighten access to its livestreaming feature as New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French leader Emmanuel Macron prepared to launch the global “Christchurch Call” initiative to tackle the spread of extremism online.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has been under intense pressure since March when a white supremacist gunman used Facebook Live to stream his rampage at two mosques in the New

Zealand city of Christchurch, which left 51 people dead.

The California-based platform said it would ban Facebook Live users who shared extremist content and seek to reinforce its own internal controls to stop the spread of offensive videos.

“Following the horrific recent 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,” Facebook vice-president of integrity Guy Rosen said in a statement.

Ardern and Macron will later issue the Christchurch Call to fight the spread of hateful and terror-related content along with leaders from Britain, Canada, Norway, Jordan and Senegal, who will also be here.

The largely symbolic initiative is intended to keep up the pressure on social media companies, who face growing calls from politicians to stop their platforms from being abused.

“It’s an action plan, it’s the start of something,” Ardern told CNN yesterday.

Many countries have tightened legislation to introduce penalties for companies that fail to take down offensive content once it is flagged by authorities.

“We need to get in front of this (problem) before harm is done,” Ardern added.

“This is not just about regulation, but bringing companies to the table and saying they have a role too.”

The political meeting here will run in parallel to an initiative launched by Macron called “Tech for Good”, which will bring together 80 tech chiefs to discuss how to harness technologies for the common good.

The heads of United States’ tech giants Wikipedia, Uber, Twitter, Microsoft and Google will attend, but not Zuckerberg, who held private one-to-one talks with Macron last week.

The social network giant will be represented by its vice-president for global affairs and communications Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister.

Ardern said: “I’ve spoken to Zuckerberg directly twice now... and he did give Facebook’s support for this call to action.”

The US government has not endorsed the Christchurch Call and will be represented only at a junior level at a meeting of G7 digital ministers, which is also taking place here.

In an opinion piece in the New

York Times, Ardern said the Christchurch massacre underlined “a horrifying new trend” in extremist atrocities.

“It was designed to be broadcast on the Internet. The entire event was livestreamed... the scale of this horrific video’s reach was staggering,” she wrote.

Ardern said Facebook removed 1.5 million copies of the video within 24 hours of the attack, but she still found herself among those who inadvertently saw the footage when it auto-played on their social media feeds.

Around 8,000 New Zealanders called a mental health hotline after seeing the video, she told CNN.

“(We’re) asking both nations and private corporations to make changes to prevent the posting of terrorist content online, to ensure its efficient and fast removal and to prevent the use of livestreaming as a tool for broadcasting terrorist attacks,” she wrote in NYT.

New Zealand officials said Ardern found a natural partner for the fight against online extremism in Macron, who has repeatedly stated that the status quo is unacceptable.