LONDON: Facebook on Tuesday teamed up with the London police to help its artificial intelligence tools track livestreams of terror attacks such as the New Zealand mosque massacre.
In March, a self-professed white supremacist used a head-mounted camera to broadcast live footage on Facebook of him attacking two mosques in the city of Christchurch.
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 Zealandâs Jacinda Ardern and other world leaders in May launched a âChristchurch Call to Actionâ against online extremism â a campaign Facebook and other major platforms quickly joined later that month.
The California-based social media behemoth said Tuesday it was in the process of updating its policies for dealing with extremism and online hate.
âSome of these changes predate the tragic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, but that attack, and the global response to it in the form of the Christchurch Call to Action, has strongly influenced the recent updates to our policies and their enforcement.â
Londonâs Metropolitan Police said the initiative will see it start providing Facebook in October with footage of training by its forearms command unit.
The videos will be captured on body cameras provided by Facebook that officers wear during exercises.
This will help Facebook âcapture the volume of images needed to train our machine learning tools,â the company said.
âThis will mean our AI tools will be able to more accurately and rapidly identify real life first person shooter incidents and remove them from our platform.â
The London police said its footage will be combined with video Facebook is already using from law enforcement agencies in the United States.
This technology will âalso significantly help prevent the glorification of such acts and the promotion of the toxic ideologies that drive them,â Britainâs Special Operations assistant commissioner Neil Basu said.
The Metropolitan Police said Facebook decided to ask London for help because it has created the worldâs first counter-terror Internet response team focused on online hate.
The speed with which the videos spread and Facebookâs initial inability to track them all down redoubled public and government scrutiny of the worldâs biggest social media company.
The Christchurch images were broadcast live for 17 minutes â and remained online for a further 12 minutes â before Facebook was alerted by a user and took it down.
Yet millions of upload and shares continued to spread online for days.
Facebook on Tuesday defended its track record but conceded that âbad actors will continue to try to get around our systems.â
It reported banning 200 white supremacist organizations and removing 26 million âpieces of contentâ or terrorist organization such as the Islamic State.
Facebook said Tuesday that it was also expanding to Australia and Indonesia a US program in which users who search for extremist content on the platform are directed to a special support group.
The US group was âfounded by former violent extremists that provides crisis intervention, education, support groups and outreach,â Facebook said.
Facebook taps London police to track terror livestreams
Updated 17 September 2019
Facebook taps London police to track terror livestreams
- Londonâs Metropolitan Police said the initiative will see it start providing Facebook in October with footage of training by its forearms command unit
- The Christchurch attack images were broadcast live for 17 minutes â and remained online for a further 12 minutes â before Facebook was alerted by a user and took it down