What is Facebook Live?

Facebook has been steadily pushing people to use its live streaming product, which was launched in 2015 but slowly rolled out to all users over the course of 2016. As a pitch, it’s simple: load the Facebook app, point your camera at anything and broadcast, live, to your friends and followers around the world.

Does anyone really want to watch what their Facebook friends are doing, live?

Some do, it seems. The service’s first viral hit came in May 2016, when 37-year-old Texan mum Candace Payne used the feature to demonstrate a Chewbacca mask she had bought for her son. Payne tries on the mask, which makes the Star Wars character’s roaring sound when she opens her mouth – and bursts into laughter. The laughter makes more roaring, which causes more laughter, and so on. The four-minute video has had 166m views.

But while this was a hit, Facebook has had trouble convincing people to use the service. Throughout 2016, it tried a different tack, paying publishers – including the Guardian – to create professional live content, and stream it exclusively on Facebook. The rationale was that the more comfortable users got with watching live video, the happier they would be to make it.

Facebook will not say how many people are using the service, but in July 2016, video intelligence company Tubular released some stats showing the disparity in scale: in June 2016 there were 6.8bn views of livestreamed content, but those videos came from just over 500,000 accounts. In other words, watching video is a mass-market thing, but making it remains very much a niche activity.

Is Facebook happy with that?

Not a bit. Since last winter, the company has been on an aggressive advertising push – only its second ever, after a slightly weird campaign in 2012 that told would-be users that “chairs are like Facebook” – encouraging users to whip out their phones and broadcast almost anything. “Go live when you see someone walking an animal that’s not a dog”, one advert read. Other situations the company thinks are worth broadcasting include “if nobody is talking about that thing you really, really, really care about” and “when you’re just hanging out with friends or whatever”. One other advert, though, foreshadowed a bigger problem for Facebook, offering instructions for “how to go live when you think you’re witnessing history”.

Couldn’t Facebook Live be a fantastic tool for sharing news as it happens?

It could. But the problem is that as the platform has entered the public’s awareness, it seems to be used as much by perpetrators of crimes as by witnesses. In April alone, two separate murders have been broadcast on the platform, by the killers: a man in Cleveland went on a rampage and broadcast the murder of 74-year-old Robert Godwin, and this week a Thai father broadcast himself killing his own 11-month-old daughter, before taking his own life once the camera was off. The platform has also had to deal with multiple livestreamed rapes and assaults, as well as a large number of suicides, both attempted and successful.

To a certain extent, these events can be chalked up as an unfortunate side-effect of scale. With 1.7 billion users – a significant chunk of the entire internet-connected population – bad things are always going to happen on Facebook. But that doesn’t mean the company can avoid all criticism: it regularly faces opprobrium for being far too slow to react to, and take down, such videos. The two videos of the Thai killing took around 24 hours to be removed, and racked up more than a quarter of a million views. A version reposted to Google’s YouTube platform was removed within 15 minutes of YouTube being notified.

Thai mother saw daughter being killed on Facebook Live Read more

Is there nothing Facebook can do?

The company’s response in many cases is that it can only remove videos once a viewer has flagged it to their moderation team. Human nature, apparently, means that all too many people are comfortable watching a video of horrific acts being performed at a distance without feeling that they should warn anyone that it’s happening. But for others, that excuse rings hollow. In response to the Cleveland incident, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would do all it could to help prevent the posting of objectionable content. In the long term, he has said, that entails the creation of new artificial-intelligence technology that can identify objectionable videos in real time, and stop the broadcast without any human intervention. But until then, humans are required, and the cost of monitoring 2m videos a month, in real time, would be extraordinary – and perhaps render the entire platform unfeasible.

The question for regulators, then, is whether to take Facebook’s promises on trust, and wait it out for a technological solution – or force a fix now.