A few months ago, I wrote here about Periscope, Twitter's live video streaming service, which is catching fire this year with digital marketers across the globe. In that post, I discussed Periscope's potential for broadcasting on the go, and for the business potential to host live events like product releases, interact with prospects and clients, provide live customer support, etc.
Obviously, it only took a few months for the competition to catch up, and just this week, Facebook Live was launched. It is a Periscope clone in every way, except for the fact that it is deeply integrated with your Facebook friends list - and your Facebook advertising. Sure, some folks have thousands of Twitter followers, some celebrities even have millions, but the average number of Facebook friends a person has is just 200. There is just a greater degree of intimacy within a Facebook friends list than a Twitter followers list, and this almost-pornographic, voyeuristic quality is what is likely to make Facebook Live irresistible compared to Periscope's more impersonal "broadcast" vibe. In fact, even the New Yorker article I linked to above ominously announces "Now You Can Never Leave [Facebook]." It's the ultimate FOMO - who doesn't want to watch what's going on at a party you couldn't attend, or catch their ex making a fool of themselves at a bar, or participate in a buddy's celebrity sighting at an airport? Or whatever people end up choosing to stream live...
Which brings me to the potentially seedy underbelly of a service like Facebook Live, whose awesome power could have terrible side effects, because of course 1.5 billion people are on Facebook, and people are terrible, and terrible people have the same access to Facebook Live that you do:
So what controls is Facebook putting in place to prevent this? Not enough:
Obviously, it only took a few months for the competition to catch up, and just this week, Facebook Live was launched. It is a Periscope clone in every way, except for the fact that it is deeply integrated with your Facebook friends list - and your Facebook advertising. Sure, some folks have thousands of Twitter followers, some celebrities even have millions, but the average number of Facebook friends a person has is just 200. There is just a greater degree of intimacy within a Facebook friends list than a Twitter followers list, and this almost-pornographic, voyeuristic quality is what is likely to make Facebook Live irresistible compared to Periscope's more impersonal "broadcast" vibe. In fact, even the New Yorker article I linked to above ominously announces "Now You Can Never Leave [Facebook]." It's the ultimate FOMO - who doesn't want to watch what's going on at a party you couldn't attend, or catch their ex making a fool of themselves at a bar, or participate in a buddy's celebrity sighting at an airport? Or whatever people end up choosing to stream live...
Which brings me to the potentially seedy underbelly of a service like Facebook Live, whose awesome power could have terrible side effects, because of course 1.5 billion people are on Facebook, and people are terrible, and terrible people have the same access to Facebook Live that you do:
The immediacy and intimacy of live broadcasting can be extremely powerful for politicians, musicians, and journalists to speak directly to you from around the world. But it could also be jarringly powerful for, say, a terrorist organization live broadcasting a beheading or a small porn business live streaming sex.
What Facebook didn’t mention is that if anyone can broadcast live, that means, well, anyone can broadcast live. (Remember Chatroullette? Yeah, people on the internet can be gross.) Even with standards in place, the live broadcast of dick vids, sex, beheadings, shootings, and their ilk seems inevitable.Imagine being an unwitting potential advertiser whose logo scrolls past an unsavory live hate speech, or torture / snuff film, or actual pornogoraphy! Oof. Business suicide.
So what controls is Facebook putting in place to prevent this? Not enough:
The company understands that and says it’ll be largely up to people like you to report them to a global review team to stop them from spreading. Facebook has “Community Standards” (read: official policies) outlining in part what kind of stuff is banned from the platform, including nudity, hate speech, and graphic violence.In other words, it will be up to you - to us - to stop crude behavior from popping up live on Facebook. But that's cold comfort! The power of LIVE is that its impact is immediate. Even if inappropriate videos are reported, they could already have gone viral. It would be too late for those who had unwillingly seen the graphic images. And here's the kicker:
Since Facebook defaults to saving the live video as a replayable one, unsavory “live” content can spread even after the broadcast ends. Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, told The New York Times that reviewing these kinds of reports typically take around 48 hours for safety issues. Since then, Facebook has tried to review (and, if needed, remove) most videos in under 24 hours, a spokesperson says. But, when it comes to stopping the spread of an unsavory livestream, even a 24-hour review period won’t be fast enough.I think businesses need to be extremely wary of committing advertising dollars to the Facebook Live platform until its moderation capabilities and content standards can be tested in the wild. As we all know, the internet is for porn.
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