Facebook AI can detect nudity, violence, will police live videos

Facebook is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, says Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning.

The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site.

Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company.

Candela says Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is "an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies," he says.

The company already had been working on using automation to flag extremist video content, as Reuters reported in June.

Now the automated system also is being tested on Facebook Live, the streaming video service for users to broadcast live video.

Using artificial intelligence to flag live video is still at the research stage, and has two challenges, Candela says. "One, your computer vision algorithm has to be fast, and I think we can push there, and the other one is you need to prioritise things in the right way so that a human looks at it, an expert who understands our policies, and takes it down."

Facebook also uses automation to process the tens of millions of reports it gets each week, to recognise duplicate reports and route the flagged content to reviewers with the appropriate subject matter expertise.