Instagram is expanding its livestream offering with a new feature called Live Rooms, which is like Instagram Live, but with up to three other people haphazardly sending their thoughts into the world at the same time.
Instagram’s Live Rooms add to the increasingly crowded live streaming space, which includes everything from Twitch to TikTok, to Audio-only Clubhouse and Twitter’s Spaces. And because most of us have absolutely no corporate live streaming for whatever reason, it also represents an increasing social media focus targeting professional creators, celebrities and brands, while creating new moderation challenges for the platforms themselves.
Live Rooms functionality is simple and straightforward. From the home screen on Instagram, swipe left and select the Live option. You can add a title and then tap the users you want to include. With Live Rooms, the person starting the stream can also add “guests” to join them halfway through the broadcast: “For example, you can start with two guests and add a surprise guest later as the third participant! 🥳,” Instagram writes in his press release about the position.
In an effort to limit harassment and other problematic behavior, any user blocked by a Live Room attendee will not be able to view the stream. And any Instagram user blocked from going live on the platform will not be able to join as a Live Room guest. Comments can also be blocked, reported and filtered, just like the solo Live feature.
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Another feature inherited from Live is badges, which viewers can purchase in the Live Room for between $ 1 and $ 5 to make their usernames look extra special in chat.
Of course, as beautiful as surprising guests and badge bling may sound, this is the internet we are talking about. And on the Internet, terrible things are happening all the time in ways that remain both shocking and completely predictable. While several third-party live video moderation tools exist, most auto moderation tools focus on text, like Reuters recently reportedIt’s possible Instagram could use live transcription tools to moderate some problematic broadcasts, as Twitter is reportedly “investigating” Spaces moderation. Or it could go Chatroulette route and use AI to clean up certain dirty streams.
In an email, an Instagram spokesperson said the company is “working on other moderator controls and audio features, which we will be launching in the coming months. Something our Live creators have been strongly asking for is more control for moderators / hosts of the broadcasts. But some hosts will certainly encourage rather than ban problematic content. And even if a live broadcast is cut halfway through the stream, it doesn’t mean it’s gone.
Facebook, owner of Instagram, knows this all too well: a shooter in 2019 livestream the massacre of Muslim worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, using the live broadcast feature. While the company claims the original live stream was viewed “less than 200 times” during the broadcast and “viewed a total of about 4,000 times before being removed from Facebook”, Facebook (and many other social platforms) rushed to remove copies of the gruesome mass murder. Of the 1.5 million copies of the Opinion uploaded to its platform, about 300,000 copies were able to pass the filters, according to Facebook.
In the aftermath of the 17-minute video that spread online, an Islamic interest group in France sued Facebook and YouTube, as the complaint states, “broadcasting a message containing violent content inciting terrorism, or of a nature that seriously violates human dignity and may be seen by a minor.” New Zealand, meanwhile continued different people for distributing or possessing the video, under a human rights law that prohibits the distribution of terrorist propaganda or content that could generate ‘hostility to’ people or groups based on their race, ethnicity or national origin.
Beyond the extreme example of the Christchurch video, Live Rooms creates more opportunities for the spread of disinformation, disinformation and other dire situations of our interconnected world. Facebook clearly has the ability to penalize users who violate live streaming rules, and it will almost certainly use those tactics to keep an eye on Live Rooms as well. But with live streams on Instagram Reportedly booming while we all remain socially aloof, it’s almost guaranteed that something terrible will slip through the cracks. And as the Christchurch tragedy illustrated, it only takes one to further spread terrorist propaganda or other dangerous content to anyone who wants to find it.
It’s easy, of course, to criticize a new feature based on its worst possibilities, and I’m sure there will be plenty of fitness teachers, musicians, and beauty vloggers out there making useful broadcasts that will make the world just a little bit less miserable during this wretched pandemic . era. But until Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms have all kinds of moderation under control, it’s hard not to assume we’ll wake up one day to the news that Live Rooms has become the latest hotbed of something dangerous and insane.