LONDON: Facebook teamed up with the London police as part of an increased effort to thwart live-streams of terror attacks such as the New Zealand mosque massacre.
A self-professed white supremacist used a head-mounted camera in March to broadcast live footage on Facebook of him attacking two mosques in the city of Christchurch.
The alliance announced was described as a new collaboration with crime fighters to train software to more quickly spot and filter violent imagery fed to the platform by “dangerous” groups or individuals.
“The video of the attack in Christchurch did not prompt our automatic detection systems because we did not have enough content depicting first-person footage of violent events to effectively train our machine learning technology,” Facebook said in a blog post.
“That’s why we’re working with government and law enforcement officials in the US and UK to obtain camera footage from their firearms training programs – providing a valuable source of data to train our systems.”
Facebook and platforms such as YouTube came under intense criticism for initially failing to detect the broadcast and then struggling to take down its uploads that proliferated online.
New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and other world leaders in May launched a “Christchurch Call to Action” against online extremism – a campaign major platforms joined later that month.
The California-based social media behemoth said it was updating and refining its policies for dealing with extremism and online hate.
The London police said its footage will be combined with video Facebook is already using from law enforcement agencies in the United States.
The new technology will “also significantly help prevent the glorification of such acts and the promotion of the toxic ideologies that drive them,” Britain’s Special Operations assistant commissioner Neil Basu said.
The machine learning tools will also be applied to Facebook’s hugely successful Instagram platform as it captures more and younger users worldwide.
The Christchurch images were broadcast live for 17 minutes – and remained online for a further 12 minutes – before Facebook was alerted by a user and took them down.
(Agencies)
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