Could Facebook have known about the nefarious direct message threats made by a gunman who, according to Texas authorities, massacred 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school? Could he have alerted the authorities?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revealed online messages minutes before Wednesday’s attack, though he called them posts, which are usually distributed to a wide audience. Facebook intervened to point out that the gunman sent direct messages one by one, not public posts, and that they were not discovered 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 increase their scrutiny of online communications, although conservative politicians, including Abbott, are also pressuring social platforms to relax their restrictions on some speeches. .
WILL FACEBOOK HAVE TO CAPTURE SHOT MESSAGES?
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, says it monitors people’s private messages for certain types of harmful content, such as links to malware or child sexual exploitation images. But copied images can be detected by unique identifiers, a kind of digital signature, which makes them relatively easy to mark for computer systems. Trying to interpret a series of threatening words, which may sound like a joke, a satire, or song lyrics, is a much more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.
Facebook could, for example, mark certain phrases as “going to kill” or “going to shoot,” but without context, something with which AI in general has a lot of problems, there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze. . . Thus, Facebook and other platforms rely on user reports to detect threats, harassment, and other violations of the law or its own policies. As the latest shootings show, this is often too late, if at all.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
Even this type of monitoring could soon become obsolete, as Meta plans to implement end-to-end encryption on its Facebook and Instagram messaging systems next year. This encryption means that no one but the sender and the recipient, not even Meta, can decrypt people’s messages. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, already has this encryption.
A recent Meta-manager report highlighted the benefits of this privacy, 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 on its messaging system. This has led the iPhone maker to a dispute with the Department of Justice over the privacy of messages. Following the fatal shooting of three U.S. sailors at a Navy facility in December 2019, the Justice Department insisted that investigators needed access to data on two locked and encrypted iPhones belonging to the alleged gunman, a Saudi aviation student.
Security experts say this could be done if Apple designed a “back door” to allow access to messages sent by suspected criminals. This secret key would allow them to decrypt information encrypted with a court order.
But the experts themselves warned that these backdoors to 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 discovering the mathematical keys that could unlock it. And when they do, everyone’s information is essentially vulnerable to anyone with a secret key.