Facebook has explained why its artificial intelligence system was unable to detect the livestream video of the mosque shootings in New Zealand that left 50 people dead last week.
Guy Rosen, the vice president of product management at Facebook, explained why the social media company failed to detect the video in a blog post Wednesday.
”This particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems,” Rosen wrote in a detailed post about the terrorist attack. “To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example, if thousands of videos from livestreamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”
Rosen also called out "bad actors" who downloaded and shared the video that were able to deceive the artificial intelligence tools in place. Facebook will begin using audio-based technology to faster identify edited videos.
The horrific video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the livestream, and watched about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook, the social media company noted.
New Zealand leaders have come forward to criticize Facebook's negligence in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has pushed for a closer look at how social media companies are held responsible for what occurs outside of the internet.
“We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and what is said is not the responsibility of the place where they are published,” she said in a speech Tuesday. “They are the publisher, not just the postman. There cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility.”
Arden has received praise for her swift response to the New Zealand shooting. She announced Thursday that the country will ban the sale of assault rifles and semi-automatic guns.
