Facebook developing artificial
intelligence to flag offensive live videos
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[December 02, 2016]
By Kristina Cooke
MENLO PARK, Calif. (Reuters) - Facebook Inc
<FB.O> 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.
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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.
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![](../images/120216pics/news_m21.jpg)
A man poses with a magnifier in front of a Facebook logo on display
in this illustration taken in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
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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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