DailyPost 901
LIVESTREAMED
The emergence of social media as the medium of choice is being reconfirmed day after day form unsuspecting young individuals to terrorists has been broadly accepted as the fact of modern day digital world. Facebook has been the platform for choice for large number of data manipulators to the live streaming of objectionable videos for the last few years, starting from Cambridge Analytica saga pertaining to the US Presidential elections. Though making the right political statements, the platform seems to have not done enough to stall this tide. There have revelations to the contrary with a scary regularity.
Only recently Facebook announced its commitment to cleanse the platform of broadly hate and objectionable content. It announced that it has employed 30,000 people for safety and security of which half of them are content cleansers operating from 20 different offices from across the globe. It claimed to have been detecting more than 95% of terrorist, violence and graphic and nudity content before uploading on the Facebook. It also claimed to be using Artificial Intelligence to sort out these issues both at scale and precision.
The scale and ease of reaching out a global audience on the fly and for eternity has been fascinating ISIS to the Lone Wolves. But today’s gunman’s killing spree being livestreamed would go down as biggest blots in this history of Facebook and the social media. Wearing a GoPro camera he live streamed 17 minutes of most ghastly killing in a mosque at Christchurch. The online Twitter communication is also for the global audience. The whole incident has led to 49 deaths.
The live-streaming was over before the Silicon Valley could react. Even with these social media giants removing the content it would continue to be available on the net, shared already in the most viral way. It would be available on some part of the World Wide Web for years to come. Where is all the Artificial Intelligence? ”The same AI is expected to take over the world, make everything better and replace humans in every profession.”
ACCOUNTABILITY OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS HAVE TO BE FIXED.
Sanjay Sahay