The company finally announced the long-anticipated changes to its terms of use of the features of its live streaming services. Moreover, Facebook announces a new 'one strike' policy, regarding the abuse of its community standards and the policy terms of using the live streaming feature.
The controversy was stemming from the gaping loophole in Facebook's services, which allowed the swift and unregulated production and distribution of violent video content was sparked more than two months ago, following the horrific terrorist attack of Christchurch, New Zealand. At the time, Facebook was accused of being negligent and not doing enough to prevent the easy access and distribution of violent content through its services. If you would like to read more about the attack and its aftermath for Facebook, you can click here.
In a public statement released yesterday, Guy Rosen, a VP integrity official of the company, announced that the company is implementing new guidelines and terms of use policies, which are meant to punish more severely users, who are found to abuse the community standards by participating in the production and intentional distribution of violent content.
“Today we are tightening the rules that apply specifically to Live. We will now apply a 'one strike' policy to Live in connection with a broader range of offenses. From now on, anyone who violates our most serious policies will be restricted from using Live for set periods of time – for example 30 days – starting on their first offense” [source]
Furthermore, Facebook also announced that it would be investing $7.5 million into partnership programs with other companies in the industry and also with academics from three leading universities, to "improve image and video analysis technology". Facebook's reason for doing emerges from the intent to make it less likely for users to incrementally alter videos and images, which are considered to breach the terms of use policies so that they can continue to spread them across the social media even after the removal of the original content.
Investors and shareholders perceived these new changes as a too little too late action on Facebook's part. Overall, the new so-called 'one strike' policy is only slightly more different compared to the previous norm of banning users from using certain services after violating the terms of use for a certain time. A 30-days ban is highly unlikely to restrain terrorists bound on suicide missions from attempting to stream live and the $7.5 million budget for financing the R&D of new technologies is perceived to be insufficient and to cover the bare minimum of what Facebook can afford to invest in such projects.
After the release of the statement, Facebook’s shares tumbled with 0.45% and extended their 2-days losing streak, which has now reached 180.73 from last Friday’s closing price of 188.34