Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who
Answers to these questions remain unclear, in part because official descriptions of the shooting and the gunman's social media activity have continued to evolve. For instance, on Thursday Texas officials made significant revisions to their timeline of events for the shooting.
But if nothing else, the shooting in
A day after the Tuesday shooting,
Facebook posts are typically distributed to a wide audience. Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy.”
HOW DID THE GUNMAN USE SOCIAL MEDIA?
By Thursday, new questions arose as to which and how many tech platforms the gunman used in the days before the shooting. The governor’s office referred questions about the gunman’s online messages to the
Some reports appear to show that at least some of the gunman's communications used
The latest mass shootings in the
COULD TECH COMPANIES HAVE CAUGHT THE SHOOTER'S MESSAGES?
It would depend on which services
Meta has said it monitors people’s private messages for some kinds of harmful 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 for computer systems to flag. Trying to interpret a string of threatening words — which can resemble a joke, satire or song lyrics — is a far more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.
Facebook could, for instance, flag certain phrases such as “going to kill” or “going to shoot,” but without context — something AI in general has a lot of trouble with — there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze. So Facebook and other platforms rely on user reports to catch threats, harassment and other violations of the law or their own policies.
SOCIAL PLATFORMS LOCK UP THEIR MESSAGES
Even this kind of monitoring could soon be obsolete, since Meta plans to roll out end-to-end-encryption on its Facebook and Instagram messaging systems next year. Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient — not even Meta — can decipher people's messages.
A recent Meta-commissioned report emphasized the benefits of such privacy but also noted some risks -- including users who could abuse the encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.
Security experts say this could be done if
But the same experts warned that such backdoors into encryption systems make them inherently insecure. Just knowing that a backdoor exists 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 the secret key.
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