Facebook has dramatically upped the technology ante with a feature enabling users to become live broadcasters, even receiving and responding to feedback in real time.

Despite being a communications marvel, Facebook Live also poses all sorts of problems. The impact is sure to be significant, but to what extent the impact is negative remains to be seen.

Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s founder, knows he’s on to something big, and it’s probable that Facebook’s rivals will seek to emulate the feature. “Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket,” Zuckerberg enthused as he introduced the program earlier this month.

The appeal is clear enough. Users can transmit live video of any event via Facebook, with spoken commentary, so that friends and followers elsewhere can enjoy it. Friends can comment in text while it’s happening. It’s certainly a boon to parents wanting to share their children’s graduation ceremonies with family friends, for example, and for vacationers and casual sports enthusiasts and anyone wanting to broadcast an amusing or historic moment as it happens. All it takes is a phone linked to the Internet.

But we can hardly expect every Facebook broadcaster to behave responsibly or ethically. Surely the worst-case scenario would be seeing a live video transmission of someone’s suicide. A woman in Taiwan has done just that – slowly asphyxiating in toxic charcoal fumes while a handful of friends watched on Facebook.

Less than two weeks after Facebook Live was announced, Thailand had its own bizarre variation on this when Makharin Phumsa-art, an Internet celebrity known as Nae Wat Dao, seemed to have shot himself in the head while many of his million fans watched. He survived, claiming to have merely grazed his forehead, but police remained dubious about the circumstances and elsewhere the whole episode has been labelled a hoax. Regardless, it was an unsettling demonstration of the potential for harm.

From the worst case we can move on to the mundane problems already emanating from this technology. More than one TV news crew at the airport last week for the return of badminton heroine Ratchanok Intanon broadcast the event live, not with professional cameras and microphones but with cellphones and Facebook. Anyone, in fact, could have done the same thing. This could represent another daunting challenge to journalists. Now anyone can be a TV reporter, bypassing the conventional media. However, while the mainstream media are ostensibly held to ethical standards, there are of course no such restrictions on private citizens.

Corporate broadcasters obviously face a challenge of their own. People are already using Facebook Live to share shows straight from the TV screen. One subscriber to a channel that was airing last weekend’s English Premier League matches broadcast the games to thousands of other people via the social network. To the Facebook user, it was simply a matter of freedom of expression, the freedom to share. To the issuers and holders of broadcasting rights, it will be a massive problem enforcing the law. To telecommunications regulators, it will be just as difficult treading the fine line between individual freedom and industry standards.

While conventional cameras are routinely banned from concerts, cellphones are usually not, so the fans can feasibly broadcast the entire show live. Thus another dilemma arises, this time for performers and record labels that naturally want to control public access.

Amid all the indicators for caution, Facebook will continue moving irrevocably forward. It is reportedly developing an app that would give users a standalone camera made for fast and more efficient live streaming. If only a small segment of the network’s 1.5 billion active users takes advantage of Facebook Live, the impact on how we communicate will be enormous. Newly empowered, the users can be forgiven for enjoying the experience, but lawmakers, telecom regulators and broadcasting corporations are in for a bumpy ride.

Editorial
(Asia News Network/The Nation)