Facebook Live is difficult to monitor

REMEMBER when Facebook was a social network, a place where you went to catch up with what your family, friends and far flung former schoolmates were up to?

OK, maybe it’s still that, but the 13-year-old platform, with an astonishing 1.86 billion monthly active users, is now many people’s primary source of news (real or fake) and advertising, it hosts one of the world’s most popular messaging services (Facebook Messenger), and is also increasingly becoming the go-to place to post weird, wacky and, sometimes, downright disturbing user-generated content.

A shocking case took place recently, when a man used Facebook Live to broadcast two video clips of himself killing his 11-month-old daughter on the rooftop of a deserted hotel in Phuket, Thailand, before committing suicide.

The Guardian reports that the upsetting content was then accessible to users on his Facebook page for approximately 24 hours before being taken down at 5pm on Tuesday. The first video had been viewed 112 000 times by mid-afternoon that day, while the second video had 258 000 views. The videos were also uploaded by other people to Google’s Youtube video service. Youtube said the videos were taken down within 15 minutes of it being notified.

This follows another incident, just over a week earlier, of a murder being posted on Facebook. In that case in Cleveland in the US, the video of the murder was not streamed live, but was available to view for three hours before being taken down.

And these are only two of the most recent extreme cases. Videos of sexual assault, torture and violent schoolyard brawls are now commonplace.

In the wake of the Cleveland killing, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg promised the company would do all it could to help prevent the posting of such content and conceded that it had a lot more work to do to maintain a safe community for its users.

Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, such incidents are only likely to become more common. Facebook Live allows anyone with a smartphone to stream video directly to the social network and with the vast majority of people who interact with Facebook now doing so via camera-equipped mobile phones, the sheer volume of content posted will make this impossible to police in real time.

Unless Facebook scraps its live broadcast service, which is highly unlikely given that it is competing with similar offerings from Twitter and Youtube, it’s only a matter of time before another shocking video surfaces.

This means it’s important to prepare yourself and family members, especially children, for the real possibility of encountering upsetting content online, whether it’s from Facebook or other sources.

The excellent New Zealandbased internet safety website, netsafe.org.nz, advises that if a young person comes to you about something they have seen online, the most important thing you can do is take what they are saying seriously.

It also advises that you try not to assign blame about how they came across the material, reassure them it isn’t their fault and don’t trivialise it by saying that the material may not be real.

Provide comfort and assurance and “normalise” their response telling them it’s normal to be scared, angry, upset or confused. Make sure that they know you are glad that they came to you about it.

“Don’t over-react by taking away the technology – this will make them less likely to talk to you if something else happens and it can make them feel like they are to blame,” Netsafe says.

Finally, do seek professional help for your child if intense feelings or behaviours persist.

The Facebook of today is a very different animal from that hatched by Zuckerberg in 2004. And judging from the innovations announced at its recent F8 developer conference, the next 13 years will bring even bigger changes, from hanging out with your Facebook friends in virtual reality to typing posts using the power of your mind.

It’s clear that all of us – commentators, policy makers, users and parents – are going to have our work cut out for us keeping up with this brilliant, but sometimes troubled, teenager as it grows into adulthood.

Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter: @alanqcooper