Users doubt Facebook can end Live violence
Social media site tries to do better controlling graphic content
SAN FRANCISCO Carissa Godbott says Facebook Live is a blessing for members of her Cleveland church — but not always.
“We do have a videographer, and you can buy different DVDs from the church, but there’s nothing like seeing it in real time,” said Godbott, 33, who works at a community college.
Deeply troubling and violent images have popped up in Godbott’s Facebook News Feed, too. By far the worst, she says, was the killing on Easter Sunday of Robert Godwin Sr., 74, not far from her church where she attended services that morning.
USA TODAY spoke with users all over the country angered that Facebook had not done more to shield them from livestreamed sexual assaults, shootings and suicides. A few encouraged the Silicon Valley company to shut down its livestreaming product until it could assure the public that such videos would no longer be broadcast.
Steps announced Wednesday by Facebook to hire 3,000 people to review videos for graphic or inappropriate material and to make videos easier for users to flag as violent were a good start, they said.
Alison Presley, 43, an administrative assistant and mother of two from Altamonte Springs, Fla., says she wants the giant social network to do more, such as warning users it will impose penalties if they put anything harmful on Facebook Live or delaying broadcasts to catch objectionable material before it can air.
“I think it is a good step, or a step towards helping to monitor some of these things,” Presley said of the measures Facebook announced. “I do not think it is enough, however.”
A consumer backlash is growing against Facebook for rolling out the live-streaming product without an adequate
plan to prevent acts of violence from being shown to its nearly 2 billion users.
Videos that glorify violence are against Facebook’s rules, but Facebook mostly relies on users to alert the company to videos that should be taken down.
Criticism has intensified since Godwin’s murder that Facebook makes it far too easy and enticing for people to expose millions of viewers to tragic images such as the murder of an 11-month-old child by her father in Thailand. There is also concern that the broadcasts spur copycats.
Godbott, who used to work with Godwin’s daughter, says she watched helplessly as gunman Steve Stephens’ uploaded video of the killing and his livestreamed confession spread like a contagion on Facebook, available for people to view and share for hours. “Something should be done about it,” Godbott says. “Facebook could see the traffic. They could see the video was shared a whole bunch of times. It was someone’s job to go in and say, ‘We need to see what’s going on.’ ”
It’s critical for Facebook, and the health of its business selling advertising, to fix the problems cropping up with Live, says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
“If there is a large issue with people’s mood or attitude toward Facebook as a result of some of these things, it will eventually impact their business because people won’t want to use it as often,” Williamson says.
In an interview with USA TODAY last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreed his company shoulders the responsibility for halting violence on Live and on Facebook in general.
Live, a pet project of Zuckerberg’s, lets Facebook users share their lives publicly in real time. It’s often used to celebrate joyful occasions such as a child’s first steps or the birth of a giraffe. It’s also used to capture traumatic, sometimes graphic, events as they unfold, from the police shooting of motorist Philando Castile last summer to the torture of a mentally challenged teenager in Chicago in January.
Teams of Facebook content moderators are trained to remove content that violates the company’s policies. Faceook has begun to use artificial intelligence software to detect troubling video and is within a few years of being able to reduce the amount of violent content on Facebook with it, Zuckerberg told USA TODAY.
That’s not soon enough for some Facebook users, who say they joined Facebook to connect with family and friends, not to be subjected to such visceral violence.
“The fact that you can’t control
“We have seen murders and suicides, how long before this medium lends itself to child pornography rings or sex traffickers?” Jeanne Croteau, psychology and social sciences professor
what is exposed to you on Facebook is most troubling to me. It almost feels like a violation to see a video start playing that is inappropriate or, in the case of the Facebook Live killer, tragically violent,” said Amanda Holstein, 28, the founder and editor of Advicefroma20Something.com.
Parents say they’re concerned children and teens are exposed to this raw, unedited footage.
“We have seen murders and suicides, how long before this medium lends itself to child pornography rings or sex traffickers?” said Jeanne Croteau, 39, a psychology and social sciences professor, writer and mother of six from Idaho. “Going live is very easy. It requires no verification of age, no pop-up about content and no warnings about potential consequences for sharing something that is criminal or, at the very least, disturbing. There is no way to even filter whether the video will be appropriate for all ages.”
Rampant voyeurism has become part of the problem, users say. Julie Arduini, 47, an author and mother of two from Poland, Ohio, says she’s nervous that Facebook Live will catch on even more than it already has.
“I can see a desperate person taking their life for all to see We’ve already seen a murder There’s pornography,” Arduini says. “Any and all of it are things that are traumatizing to everyone involved, even viewers who otherwise have no connection to the person on Live.”
Not all the onus in putting a stop to violence on Live is on Facebook, users say. People on the site must take responsibility for watching, then sharing violent videos. If they did not pass them along to others, users say, people would have less incentive to make them in the first place.
Kirstin Fuller, 49, a travel blogger from Washington, says Facebook works to quickly take down videos once alerted. But, says Fuller, who uses Facebook Live on her Passenger156.com blog, “there’s room for improvement.”
Fuller says she is haunted by a video in which a young girl was sexually harassed by teenage boys. “She looked so traumatized in the video,” she says. “It felt like a tremendous invasion of her privacy.”