Consider a live streaming ban, says former Facebook CEO

A former Facebook boss says social media giants should consider banning live streaming in the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks.

Stephen Scheeler, former Facebook CEO for Australia and New Zealand, says he used to be a proponent of freedom online, but his convictions have faltered. Picture: Holly Adams/The Australian

The former head of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand says tech giants must consider banning live streaming after white supremacist Brenton Tarrant used the video service to broadcast the Christchurch terror attack.

Stephen Scheeler, the former Facebook CEO in Australia and New Zealand, said social media companies could remove live streaming from their platforms, and that artificial intelligence measures to stop extreme content getting online wasn’t effective.

“There’s two ways to think about it, one is stop live streaming as a product, simply they could, so there’s no live streaming. That’s an option.” he told 3AW today.

“And we’ve just seen an example here, unfortunately the state of artificial intelligence isn’t intelligent enough to stop something like this.” he said.

“You have to ask yourself the question what else isn’t being stopped, something as egregious is this is not being taken down.”

Facebook said on Sunday it had removed 1.5 million copies of the video and was continuing to work with authorities to find and remove other copies. Google has removed thousands of copies after the video was uploaded to its YouTube video sharing site.

Mr Sheeler said introducing laws targeting executives and board members for failing to adequately police their platforms may encourage tech companies to take proactive action, pointing to OHS liability laws as an example.

“Suddenly what happened we went from not really looking at OHS issues to really looking at them,” he said.

“Because if somebody was killed or hurt severely in our company I could go to jail.”

Mr Scheeler said he used to be a proponent of freedom online but his convictions had faltered in the last few years.

“Definitely in the last couple of years I think we’ve come to a point where we have to question is the ideal of freedom going to trump everything else in terms of the negative effects that these platforms can have.”

“Massive profits, neglected responsibility”

Meanwhile, the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre Alastair MacGibbon says social media companies have failed to protect societies.

The Chief Adviser on cyber security to the Prime Minister said big tech were earning massive profits while neglecting to take responsibility.

“These companies have had the world’s best engineers creating remarkable products and monetising those products at an amazing rate,” he told 3AW this morning.

“What they haven’t done is live up to their social responsibilities of protecting the society’s from which they profit.”

Mr MacGibbon said the internet should be regulated in the same way as motorists driving on roads.

“I was driving earlier this morning … I feel quite free,” he said.

“I love the freedom of driving but I know there are things I can and can’t do.”

“There is no reason why the internet shouldn’t be exactly the same type of place, in fact my driving is different in different countries and so too should the internet be.

“That is it needs to reflect the society that it serves … There should no great difference between the internet in Australia and our offline society in Australia.”

Mr MacGibbon said that social media companies which had initially resisted co-operating with authorities had changed their tune before, pointing to child pornography crackdowns, anti-bullying campaigns and interference in the 2016 US election as examples of prior backflips.

“There’s nothing new or outrageous here, it’s not prohibition versus anarchy, all of our society has rules and regulation, rules of the world, how we’re meant to behave,” he said.

“We need to reflect that in our legislation for the online space that should be treated no differently to our offline world.”