Hisham Sarwar
As New Zealand is asking answers from Mark Zuckerberg over LIVE mosque attack video, the most worrying fact is, Facebook issues a statement saying, no one reported it to Facebook for 29 minutes and with thousands of views. The terrifying act of terrorism that took the lives of 50 people offering their prayers in a mosque was broadcasted live. By the time Facebook removed the 17 minutes video, it had already gained roughly 4,000 views.
This incident demands serious answers, steps from Facebook. The world’s largest social media website has roughly over 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018. The website has 1.15 billion mobile daily active users.
There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of Facebook to take a prompt action about its LIVE functionality. Currently, any Facebook profile or a page can broadcast live and with an ability to share the video, the content can be distributed to thousands of people in a very quick time.
The question arises, what will Facebook do to address this growing concern. Anyone could take a lead from this ugly act of terrorism and live broadcast any kind of ugly, ill-mannered activity.
Artificial intelligence is not smart enough yet to figure out any violent content and stop, remove it immediately before it is viewed and distributed to others timeline and pages.
So, the only available solution right now seems to be pulling the strings back. Facebook was equally popular before the live facility was rolled out to every profile. I understand, Mark Zuckerberg wants to shift the tide of company’s operation to video content as this seems to be the patron of focus recently, but the mental stress one terrorist has caused to many social media users cannot be estimated.
It won’t be a bad idea to pull back the live privilege from every profile and give this facility to verified profiles only so it can not be misused in the future.
