Emmanuel Macron Takes a Closer Look at Facebook
An initiative by France and New Zealand to tackle extreme content is encouraging. But policymakers must grasp the all-important algorithms.
Will French officials really get access to Facebook's "secret sauce?"
Photographer: CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/AFPSocial networks such as YouTube and Facebook have the power to make content go “viral,” spreading it at an unprecedented and uncontrollable pace. That seems innocent enough when you’re looking at a cat video, but if it’s murder, for example, the lack of a way of stopping the virus becomes glaring.
After the New Zealand mosque shootings were streamed live in March, attempts to remove the video from online platforms were shown to be hopeless. Facebook took it down 1.5 million times and it still reappeared. And it was put back up on YouTube every second for 24 hours, according to New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who’s teaming up with French president Emmanuel Macron to try to tackle the plague of harmful online content.