Continuing his call for regulatory reform, Bill Mew, our principle consultant, addresses the criticism of Facebook and other social platforms following the live streaming of the terrorist incident in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Once aware of the content Facebook moved to pull it down and used a fingerprint of the video content to prevent it being posting. In all it countered 1.5 million attempts to post the video, but its efforts were in part undermined by 8chan an Alt Right site that captured a copy and posted it on its site encouraging peopke to share it.

Bill addresses the challenges here with spotting terrorist content in the first place given the volume of content and the inability of AI to moderate it yet, as well as the challenge of preventing it being reposted once spotted. A fingerprint can be made of a video and can prevent it being reposted thereafter if unaltered by matching patterns, what are referred to as the digital fingerprints, in the files. However users determined to get around these checks can make small alterations, such as tweaking the color or the video speed, making it almost impossible to spot.

Add to this the fact that messaging apps and other platforms may soon adopt end to end encruption and this will make it almost impossible to monitor and moderate content.