Why Facebook could not stop the transmission of the New Zealand shooter?

When in September 2017 Mark Zuckerberg he had to give some answers about the role of his company in Russia's attempts to manipulate the US presidential election, said the CEO of Facebook He said in a publication on his social network: "We do not check what people say before saying it, and honestly, I do not think society wants us to do it." Freedom means that you do not have to ask permission first, and you can say whatever you want. "

This Friday, after an armed man used Facebook's streaming service to broadcast live the killing of dozens of people in a mosque in New Zealand, Zuckerberg's words take on a new meaning.

And whatever their statements and the responses of Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and other social networks about the role they played in the dissemination of images and videos of the shooting of Christchurch, we must not forget What?the networks have worked for what they are designed for: allowing humans to share what they want, when they want, with as many people as they wish"The journalist Peter Kafka said in an article published by Recode.

"Of course, Facebook does not want the killers to pbad on their crimes to everyone, but social networks are a tool that allows them to do exactly that, a tool that is built on a fundamentally built platform to allow people to say what they do, want, without asking permission first, "Kafka added.

And that's precisely the key to Facebook's tremendous success as a business: Users provide the content, and Facebook-designed software instantly distributes it around the world. More than a billion people – users and advertisers – download what they want on this social network, without human intervention. And the fact that Facebook does not review comments, announcements, or (almost) everything before it's published is also what gives it great legal protection, especially in the US: is something offensive or illegal in Facebook, It 's not because Facebook has put it there, but because someone has put it on Facebook.

Indeed, it is the model of all the platforms of the giants who left Silicon Valley during the last decade: YouTube and Twitter do not close their comments or their videos before downloading them, and Airbnb does not check them neither.

In his post of 2017, Zuckerberg explained that dubious content would be eliminated after its download, which happened with the shooter's account shortly after the live broadcast. The company announced that it would invest billions of dollars in a combination of software and people to fight against future abuse.

It is possible that the changes made by Facebook reduce the virality of images, but they could not prevent them from downloading on the platform. It is also possible that Facebook finds it much harder to control, because in last week's announcement, Zuckerberg explained that the company plans to provide full encryption of messages ("end-to-end encryption prevents anyone, including understood to see what people share in our services "). If you do not "look" at the content of the messages, you can hardly control it.

In his message of 2017, after explaining that he had not censored the messages previously, Zuckerber said, "If you break the rules of our community or the law, then you will have to suffer the consequences." . Journalist Peter Kafka added, "It's hard to imagine the consequences that Facebook can impose on a person who has killed dozens of people today, and it's hard to imagine that it will not happen again."