Can Facebook Stop Nasty Live Streams? No.
Keep in mind that if Facebook restricts live-streaming in any way:
- They will lose a lot of business
- People will use other platforms that are less restrictive
Options Facebook have are:
- Delay live-streaming with enough buffer to check it is acceptable
- Ban all live-streaming
- Extra scrutiny on any video seeing a lot of activity
- AI to spot the types of video that should be banned
Basically Facebook cannot afford to pay people to check every single video, and even if they could, they couldn’t check every part of every video. And AI will struggle to tell the difference between schoolyard bullying and a boxing match, between a massacre and Fortnite.
Not every shocking live stream will generate enough of a viewer spike to warrant attention.
Meanwhile, the bad live-streamers can:
- Start the video with something innocuous and switch to the nasty mid-way
- Post is as a regular video
- Stream it across multiple accounts, using filters to make each video seem unique
- Use a different platform and link to it
To me the future is obvious. One that is regulated (identified people only, nothing anonymous), alongside a wild west that cannot be stopped.