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Facebook

Facebook Live is changing the world - but not in

the way it hoped
Facebooks betting big on everyone streaming their lives in real time, but has it
unleashed a monster it cant control?

Candace Payne the woman behind the megaviral Chewbacca Video does Good Morning America.
Photograph: Josiah Kamau/BuzzFoto via Getty Images

Alex Hern
Thursday 5 January 2017 17.08 GMT

In August 2015, Facebook rolled out a new feature: the ability to broadcast live
video streams from the companys app for power users, Facebook Mentions. Six
months later, the feature, now branded Facebook Live, began a slow rollout for
normal users, initially in the United States.
In classic Facebook style, the feature was late arriving, slow to roll out, and
steadily demolished the competition. Meerkat, the company which ignited the
live streaming craze, launched its mobile app in February 2015 and went meteoric
at the South by Southwest Festival in March that year. But its time in the sun was
limited: shortly after SXSW ended, Twitter subsidiary Periscope launched its own,
technically superior, live-streaming service, eclipsing Meerkat almost instantly.
For almost a year, Periscope dominated live streaming, peaking, bizarrely, with
the phenomenon of 20,000 people watching pedestrians trying to navigate a large
puddle in Newcastle. But Facebooks sheer scale ensures that when it sets its
sights on an area, theres very little most competitors can do to keep it from
rolling over them like a juggernaut.

travel
all

A snapshot in time of Facebook Live. Photograph: Facebook

Facebook has thrown resources at its live-streaming product. Extensive

developer time, ad budget, and media partnerships are all devoted to ensuring
that its a success, thanks in part to orders from the very top: its chief executive,
Mark Zuckerberg, is said to personally support the product, which he sees as
instrumental to the next stage of Facebooks growth, and has been one of the
most prolific users of the feature, periodically going live on his own Facebook
page to answer questions from users.
Beyond Zuckerberg himself, Facebook has secured the support of a number of
other prominent users partially by paying for them. Media organisations,
including Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and the Guardian, have signed deals
with Facebook to produce Live content, in exchange for large payments form the
social network.
But power users and media firms do little to encourage other Facebook users to
go live themselves a key part of its long-term goal for the feature.
To that end, Facebook has also been on an ad blitz, coating key markets such as
San Francisco, Los Angeles and London with adverts encouraging users to go live
when you see someone walking an animal thats not a dog, while everyone is
waiting for the first suitcase to drop at an airport, and when youre just hanging
out with friends or whatever. The company has also taken a leaf out of archrival
Snapchats book, offering a plethora of augmented reality masks to encourage
users to play around with the tech.
But none of that had anything to do with the first viral hit to come from Facebook
Live. In May 2016, a few months after the feature had launched in the US, 37year-old Texan Candace Payne spent four minutes demonstrating a new gift she
had bought for her son: a (real) mask of the Star Wars character Chewbacca, with a
pre-recorded roar that plays when the wearer opens their mouth. The short video
opens with a charming introduction from Payne, who quickly puts the mask on
before collapsing into a fit of giggles which lasts, more or less continuously, for
the next three minutes. It currently has 165m views on the social network.
In some ways, Paynes video set the precedent for how Live videos would evolve.
For one thing, although the video was broadcast live, the overwhelming majority
of its viewers came long after she had put the phone down and stopped
broadcasting: the difference from pre-recorded videos was evolutionary, not
revolutionary. Payne doesnt really interact with what audience there was
watching her live, either, despite Zuckerbergs earlier promises that when you
interact live, you feel connected in a more personal way.
But in other ways, the major cultural impact of Facebook Live has little to do with
Paynes joyful short, nor really with the companys own intentions as
communicated through adverts and executive postings.
Perhaps the most important choice Facebook made in launching Live was to
incorporate it directly into the main Facebook app, unlike Periscopes initial

launch as a standalone product. Facebook is no stranger to spinning popular

features off into their own application most notably with Messenger, in 2014
but the companys decision here means that even users who have never felt the
need to explore live streaming have the option if they suddenly find themselves
in extraordinary circumstances.
One such circumstance, which has become almost emblematic of the features
social resonance, is that of a confrontation with the state. In July 2016, less than a
month after Paynes video went viral, a very different video was broadcast from
Minnesota, where Diamond Reynolds documented the immediate aftermath of a
police officer shooting her boyfriend, Philando Castile. The video showed
Reynolds calmly telling the officer, and viewers, what had happened: how Castile
had been asked for his license and registration, told the officer he was legally
carrying a gun, and was shot seven times while subsequently reaching for his
license.

The death of Alfred Olango in a San Diego police shooting was documented on Facebook Live. Photograph:
Facebook Live / Rumbie Mubaiwa

Castile was just the first. Keith Scott Lamont was shot in September in North
Carolina, and his daughter streamed the immediate aftermath. The death of
Alfred Olango, shot by police in San Diego in September, was streamed by a
bystander.
The association between Facebook Live and police killings is about more than just
being the only camera available. Live streaming has other features that make it
appropriate for documenting the tense, dangerous moments in the aftermath of a
death.
The immediacy of the broadcast can alert loved ones, while acting as a call to arms
for the fight for justice. And once the video is uploaded, its hard to delete it:
important when dealing with an untrusted adversary with the legal power to
confiscate devices and suppress footage.
Even if police do manage to encourage Facebook to pull the video as Baltimore
police department did with the account of Korryn Gaines, who live streamed her
armed standoff against by then, copies have likely been made elsewhere.
And Facebooks own systems help. The site aggressively pushes video to the top
of newsfeeds while its still live, in an effort to encourage the interaction
Zuckerberg spoke of, allowing videos to snowball rapidly to large audiences.
But those audiences also outpace Facebooks own ability to moderate content.
While videos can be reported, for spam or offensive content, just like other posts,
the real-time nature of the events seems to be beyond Facebooks scope, meaning

that videos are often taken down hours after theyve already ended.
Thats useful to activists, who can spread word of a police shooting before the
video gets taken down for being threatening, violent or suicidal. But it has also
led to a second category of videos unique to the service, depicting crimes in
process, from the torture of a disabled man in Chicago to a double murder in the
name of Isis in France.
Facebook could solve that problem, to a certain extent, by throwing money at it:
hiring more low-paid contract workers in the anglophone developing world to
watch videos of murder and rape so you dont have to. But that still doesnt help
the companys larger aim, of making Facebook Live a thing normal people will
want to use, not just to watch paid celebrities, but to broadcast their lives to their
friends and family. There is a chance that that will never be something that
spreads outside of a small niche: but history suggests its safer to bet on Mark
Zuckerberg than bet against him.

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