Facebook tightens live-streaming in crackdown on violence

Facebook announced Wednesday it is tightening access to livestreaming to prevent the rampant sharing of graphic video as took place with the Christchurch massacre.

People who have broken certain rules, including those against "dangerous organisations and individuals," will be restricted from using the Facebook Live streaming feature, said vice president of integrity Guy Rosen.

"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," Rosen said in a statement.

A "one-strike" policy at Facebook Live will be applied to a broader range of offenses, with those who violate serious policies suspended from using the feature after a single offence.

Such offenses would include sharing a link to a statement from a terrorist group with no context, according to Rosen.

"We plan on extending these restrictions to other areas over the coming weeks, beginning with preventing those same people from creating ads on Facebook," Rosen said.

He added that technical innovation is needed to get ahead of the kind of "adversarial media manipulation" seen after the New Zealand mosque massacre, such as users modifying videos in order to slip past filters.

"One of the challenges we faced in the days after the attack was a proliferation of many different variants of the video of the attack," Rosen said.

"People -- not always intentionally -- shared edited versions of the video which made it hard for our systems to detect."
"We hope it will also help us to more effectively fight organised bad actors who try to outwit our systems as we saw happen after the Christchurch attack."