Facebook developing artificial intelligence to flag offensive live videos
Facebook developing artificial intelligence to flag
offensive live videos
By Kristina Cooke December 1, 2016
MENLO PARK, Calif. (Reuters) - Facebook Inc is working on
automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a
growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin
Candela, the company’s director of applied machine learning.
The social media company has been embroiled in a number
of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry
after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the
spread of fake news on its site.
Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report
offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company
"community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues
that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company.
Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was
using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is “an algorithm
that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to
our policies,” he said. The company already had been working on using automation
to flag extremist video content, as Reuters reported in June.
Now the automated system also is being tested on Facebook
Live, the streaming video service for users to broadcast live video.
Using artificial intelligence to flag live video is still
at the research stage, and has two challenges, Candela said. “One, your
computer vision algorithm has to be fast, and I think we can push there, and
the other one is you need to prioritize things in the right way so that a human
looks at it, an expert who understands our policies, and takes it down.”
Facebook said it also uses automation to process the tens
of millions of reports it gets each week, to recognize duplicate reports and
route the flagged content to reviewers with the appropriate subject matter
expertise. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in November said Facebook
would turn to automation as part of a plan to identify fake news. Ahead of the
Nov. 8 U.S. election, Facebook users saw fake news reports erroneously alleging
that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump and that a federal agent who had been
investigating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was found dead.
However, determining whether a particular comment is
hateful or bullying, for example, requires context, the company said.
Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of AI research, declined
to comment on using AI to detect fake news, but said in general news feed
improvements provoked questions of tradeoffs between filtering and censorship,
freedom of expressions and decency and truthfulness.
“These are questions that go way beyond whether we can
develop AI,” said LeCun. “Tradeoffs that I’m not well placed to determine.”
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Peter Henderson)
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