Can Facebook be aware of ominous threats of direct messages from a gunman who, according to Texas authorities, killed 19 children and two primary school teachers? Could he have warned the authorities?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revealed online messages sent minutes before Wednesday’s attack, although he called them publications that are usually distributed to a wide audience. Facebook intervened to note that the shooter sent direct messages one-on-one, not public posts, and that they were not found until “after the terrible tragedy.”
Recent mass shootings in the United States by active social media users may put more pressure on social media companies to tighten control over online communications, although conservative politicians – Abbott among them – are also urging social platforms to ease restrictions on some speeches.
SHOULD FACEBOOK CATCH THE SHOOTER’S MESSAGES?
The parent company, Facebook Meta, said it monitors people’s personal messages about certain types of malicious content, such as links to malware or images of child sexual exploitation. But copied images can be detected using unique identifiers – a kind of digital signature – which makes them relatively easy to mark on computer systems. Trying to interpret a series of threatening words – which may resemble a joke, satire or lyrics – is a much more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.
Facebook may, for example, mark certain phrases as “I’ll kill” or “I’ll shoot”, but without context – something that AI has a lot of problems with in general – there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze. So Facebook and other platforms rely on user reports to capture threats, harassment and other violations of the law or their own policies. As recent shootings show, this often comes too late, if at all.
PLANNED AGING
Even this type of surveillance may soon be obsolete, as Meta plans to introduce end-to-end encryption in its Facebook and Instagram messaging systems next year. Such encryption means that no one but the sender and recipient – even Meta – can decrypt people’s messages. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, already has such encryption.
A recent report commissioned by Meta highlighted the benefits of such confidentiality, but also noted some risks – including users who could abuse encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.
Apple has long had end-to-end encryption in its messaging system. This has brought the iPhone maker into conflict with the Department of Justice over message privacy. Following the deadly shooting of three U.S. sailors at a Navy installation in December 2019, the Justice Department insisted investigators needed access to data from two locked and encrypted iPhones belonging to the alleged gunman, an aviation student in Saudi Arabia. .
Security experts say this could happen if Apple creates a “back door” to allow access to messages sent by alleged criminals. Such a secret key would allow them to decrypt encrypted information with a court order.
But the same experts have warned that such back doors in encryption systems make them inherently insecure. Just knowing that there is a back door is enough to focus the world’s spies and criminals on finding the mathematical clues that could unlock it. And when they do, everyone’s information is essentially vulnerable to anyone with a secret key.
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