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Facebook Launches New Policy ‘One Strike’ to Prevent People from Misusing Live Streaming

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Live streaming is popular, and Facebook is among those social media platforms, who brought this feature to the common people for the very first time. But in recent times, the company has witnessed how people are missing the very feature and violating Facebook’s live video streaming guidelines. Not taking a very old example, the live broadcast of the inhuman mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand in March took everybody by shock.

facebook live stream
Image Source: marketingland.com

Keeping all this in mind, the company has decided that it will be implementing a ‘one strike’ rule, for the ones, who will be violating its live video streaming guidelines. According to the company, it will take down the accounts for a set time period, if they fail to maintain the live streaming guidelines and violate the rules.

“Starting today, people who have broken certain rules on Facebook, including our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy will be restricted from using Facebook Live,” Facebook wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

The company confirmed that the ‘one strike’ rule is the result of the live broadcast of the horrifying New Zealand terrorist attack, which people kept on sharing even after Facebook had taken down the video. In fact, people were editing the video so that they could prevent the video from getting identified and will be shared further.

For such matters, the company has announced that it will be investing $7.5 million in new research partnerships, to carry out researches across industry and academia in order to improve the analysing techniques for the images and videos posted on the platform.

Previously, the company did not have much of strict rules for the violation of any of its guidelines. e.g. if there was a post that spread hate or rumours, Facebook would take the post down, and if the offence is done repeatedly by an account, the account was banned for a set period of time. But now, the rules will be stricter, as if Facebook finds someone broadcasting something offensive and violates the Facebook’s live stream guidelines for the very first time, the company will ban the account from live streaming for a certain time limit.

Facebook is also tightening its rules for the other areas that need attention, and for now, it will also be imposing strict rules for the people, who create ads that misguide people and spread hate.

“The overwhelming majority of people use Facebook Live for positive purposes, like sharing a moment with friends or raising awareness for a cause they care about. Still, Live can be abused and we want to take steps to limit that abuse.” the company wrote in the blog post.

Facebook Taking Initiatives to Help Improve the Job Conditions for its Contractors

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Facebook hires contractors for its different kinds of jobs, like moderation of the content as well as training the AI, etc. Those contractors are hired on the hourly bases. But recently, The Verge exposed the poor condition of those contact-bound moderators at the Facebook workplace in an article. Following which, Facebook finally is planning to increase the salaries of those contractors and will be providing them with extra benefits in order to improve their job conditions.

facebook moderator
Image Source: techspot.com

The company said in a blog post, “Today we’re committing to pay everyone who does contract work at Facebook in the US a wage that’s more reflective of local costs of living. And for those who review content on our site to make sure it follows our community standards, we’re going even further. We’re going to provide them with a higher base salary, additional benefits, and more supportive programs given the nature of their jobs.”

The company had set a basic pay of $15 per hour for every contractor in 2015, which in the past four years remained the same. Now according to the announcement from the company, after the increase in the wages the contractors in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Washington, DC will soon receive a $20 hourly pay, and the ones from Seattle will earn $18 per hour. And this is not limited to the U.S. alone, but the contractors working with Facebook internationally will also get a hike in their hourly pay.

The Verge’s article on the Facebook moderator exposed a lot about the bad effect on the mental health of people. Many of those moderators even became suicidal. This has been a matter of concern for Facebook too. So now the company is also working on developing tools, that can help in protecting the moderators’ mental well being. According to the company, it will be providing its contractors with resilience training and counselling at their workplace.

The company will also be providing the moderators with other benefits including a minimum 15 days of paid holidays, sick leaves, and $4000 new child benefits for the new parents, who could not get the paternal or maternity paid leaves.

Also for the first time, the company now will provide the contractors with new options while moderating the Facebook content, such as they will now be able to blur an image temporarily for review.

The company said that the moderators and the contractors are the essential part of the company and their well being is the most required thing for the company as they “provide important services across a content review, security, culinary, transportation and other teams” and help in maintaining the content according to its community guideline.

Facebook Keeps Billions from its Q1 2019 Profits to Finally Pay Fine Over the Privacy Violations

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Despite the various privacy scandals and penalties have been credited to the name of Facebook, the company has reported a beneficial Q1 for 2019. The company released the Q1 2019 report on Wednesday, and reportedly, Facebook has earned 2.5 per cent more monthly users compared to the last year’s Q4 monthly users. That means Facebook has reached over 2.38 billion monthly users as well as 1.56 billion daily active users, whereas it had recorded a 2.32 billion monthly users and 1.52 billion daily users in Q4 2018.

Facebook
Image Source: thenewsminute.com

Revenue-wise too, the company has reported an increase of 26 per cent in year-over-year sales, i.e., up to $15.1 billion raise on the yearly income. The earnings are ahead of what the company had expected itself, in fact, it was expecting the revenues to be in loss to an extent. But having earned that much of money is great for Facebook, as it still has to settle the record-setting fine which Federal Trade Commission had imposed on it.

In the past years, Facebook has been found guilty of the data breach, despite the company claiming that some of the information of the Facebook users remains private. The biggest fine FTC has imposed was of $22.5 billion, that too, on the tech giant Google. And this time, it was expected that Facebook will be paying even bigger of a penalty, after series of cases of a privacy violation, including the matter in which Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect data from millions of users without their knowledge.

For the past few months, Facebook is trying to reduce the amount of the fine, setting up meetings with FTC, and according to both the companies, they haven’t come to any conclusions. But with the high earned revenues, Facebook has decided to keep $3 to $5 billion separately to pay the fine and will not include this amount in the reported revenues.

“In the first quarter of 2019, we reasonably estimated a probable loss and recorded an accrual of $3.0 billion in connection with the inquiry of the FTC into our platform and user data practices, which accrual is included in accrued expenses and other current liabilities on our condensed consolidated balance sheet. We estimate that the range of loss in this matter is $3.0 billion to $5.0 billion. The matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or the terms of any final outcome.” wrote Facebook in regard to the FTC fine.

Facebook and the other tech giants are now becoming more careful about how and where to use users’ data. Facebook has also agreed to build some strict guidelines over the users’ privacy on the platform in the 2011 deal with the FTC to avoid any privacy breach cases in future.

Facebook to Soon Roll Out a New Voice Assistant for its AR/VR Products Lineup

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First Siri and then Alexa, followed by a few other voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby, have made their own space among people. Now in the same course, Facebook is also about to launch its own AI-based digital voice assistant. The company, too, has confirmed the news that it will be soon introducing a new voice assistant for its AR and VR lineup.

facebook voice assistant
Image Sourec: washingtonpost.com

“We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products.” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

According to a former Facebook employee, the company has been working on the voice assistant for its augmented reality and virtual reality division for a year now. The team of developers, for this new product, is led by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant, and the team is based out of Redmond, Washington.

It is expected that the voice assistant is especially being built for the AR, VR products including the Oculus headsets as well as the company’s Portal video chat device.

This is not the first time that the company is trying its hands in the field of voice assistant production. But, in 2015, Facebook had launched a voice assistant for its messenger named as ‘M’. The product could not sustain for long as despite offering the users smart suggestions, it required human help to run.

Even though the company has been working on its voice assistant for a year, it is still way behind the digital voice assistants by the other tech giants. But according to the company, its voice assistant will focus more on the products that can handle hands-free interactions. This way the genre of Facebook’s voice assistants may not be similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

UK Govt is Preparing New Guidelines for Social Media Platforms to Protect Children

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According to the recent reports, Facebook, Instagram as well as Snapchat will have to remove the like button and in the case of Snapchat, the streaks for the users under 18. The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) has said that it is going to impose 16 new rules for various social media platforms in order to make those platforms safer for young kids.

social media platforms
Image Source: wsj.com

One of those rules is indicating towards removing the like button from the different social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as according, to ICO the like button nudges the kids to stay online on those platform for a longer time.

“We’ve launched the draft of our Age Appropriate Design code, which sets the standards for those designing, developing and providing online services to children.” a tweet from the official account of ICO stated.

ICO is also working on the other rules to stop the social media companies from nudging the users younger than 18 years old, to reduce the screen time for them and to control their privacy. According to the new rules the social media platforms will have to keep the user information private by default, and until necessary, the kids should not be asked to share their private information.

The new guidelines will also prevent the companies to ask the kids under 18 to share their geolocations in any circumstances, as the geolocations map the accurate location of the phone.

The initiative of crafting new rules, for keeping the kids under 18 safe, has been taken by the government of UK, after the MPs and other public figures criticised those social media platforms for bad effects on the children. In fact, the Duke of Sussex has called those platforms more addictive than drugs and alcohol.

Though it is a great initiative, for now, it has been only taken in the UK. In fact, in the UK too, the rules will be imposed only in 2020, after the consultation will be over in May 2019, for the other rules. The ICO will start working on making the guidelines starting from Monday, and will consult and take opinions from the public as well as experts. After the guidelines come into effect, the companies would need to pay fine in millions and billions, if it failed to follow.

Facebook Might Bring Back the Chat Feature to its Mobile App

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Almost five years ago, Facebook started pushing its users to use its standalone messaging app, Facebook Messenger, by disabling the chat feature from its social media app. At the time, most of the people were annoyed with this step taken by the company, but in past years they have become apt with the messaging app.

facebook messenger
Image Source: hanoitimes.vn

But in recent years, having got the most of the user engagement on the messenger, rather than the social media platform, it might be possible that Facebook is encouraged to bring the chat feature back to its Facebook app. Noticeably, the Facebook messenger is currently serving to over 1.3 billion monthly users, which is huge.

According to a tweet by the researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is testing the basic chat feature on its social media app. Wong tweeted, “Facebook is bringing the Chats back to the app for preparing integrated messaging.” In fact, she had tweeted a few hours before this tweet that she will be uncovering one upcoming feature that most of the people will like.

About a month ago the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had mentioned that the company will be having its emphasis more on its messaging unit. He had also expressed his intention for unifying all the messaging app from Facebook, i.e., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. And, now the testing of the new chat feature for the Facebook app may be the company’s first step towards the very objective.

For now, the company is testing a basic chat feature for the Facebook app, and according to reports, there is no support for the video call, image sharing, the sticker sharing and the other Messenger options in it.

The company has not commented on the matter yet, and there may be a possibility that the feature remains unreleased for quite some time, as it is still in testing. According to Wong, there has been no mention of dissolving the Facebook Messenger as it will continue to serve the users that are on Facebook solely to use the messaging app and are not active on the Facebook app.