Facebook shakes up Live with new social chat features

Facebook Live might be about bringing the entire community together around events, but sometimes you just want to know the reactions of your buddies.

Facebook has already announced that its AR camera effects platform will be coming to Live, an announcement today brings a couple of other changes to the platform surrounding social interactions in Live: Live Chat with Friends and Live With.

Comment streams on popular Live videos are a bit overwhelming at the moment, there’s a pretty torrential outpour of similar reactions to when something happens on video. Facebook says that there are actually ten times as many comments on Live vides as there are on regular recorded videos.

Ultimately, Facebook wants to help you sift through the visual spam and have more meaningful interactions on these videos, which is why they’re adding a feature that lets you easily live chat with friends inside Live videos.

When you create a private chatroom, you’ll have the option of inviting new people or just finding out who among your friends is already watching and toss them into a private room. It’s a way for Facebook to dial-in the wide-reaching Live platform and make it more personal for users. People can still easily jump in between group feeds and friend chat.

In addition to the Live Chat with Friends feature, Facebook is launching a feature that will let you go live with another friend in a side-by-side conversation. This feature was previously available to public figures, but now it’s rolling out wide, allowing you to argue or chat with friends in a Live setting.

Live With basically allows you to FaceTime with your friends in a public setting, it’s a completely different way to capture social interaction and it definitely offers something new.

You have these conversations in landscape mode for a split-screen style or portrait for picture-in-picture mode as seen in the image.

Live With is open for all profiles and pages on iOS. Facebook is already testing Live Chat with Friends in a few countries and says they’ll be making it more widely available later this summer.

Facebook emoji Reactions now available on comments

As the social network has just added the functionality, not everyone will be able to use it quite yet

Facebook users can now react to comments with emoji.

The feature allows members of the site to react quickly to discussions under user’ posts and status updates with the Like graphic or a number of expressions Facebook calls ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’ and ‘Angry’.

To reply to a comment with one of the emoji, all users need to do is hover over the Like button directly below the comment and wait for the faces to appear.

The update is predominantly targeted at the site’s younger users, though it can help everyone save a bit of time and potential embarrassment.

Previously, users could either Like a comment or reply to it with text or an image. Typing while on the move can be a pain, and Liking a sad post can seem insensitive.

The Reaction emoji are handy for putting across the right message, whether that's happy or sad, with a quick tap.

“We’ve heard from people they’d like more ways to show their reaction in conversations on Facebook, so we’re rolling out the ability to react to comments,” the company said.

However, as the social network has just introduced the functionality, not everyone will be able to use it quite yet.

Facebook first introduced its Reactions emoji a year ago, but back then, users could only use them on posts and updates, not comments.

They’ve since landed on Messenger too, where they work in the exact same manner.

A recent study found that receiving Likes on social media posts doesn't make people feel better about themselves or improve their mood if they are down.

It found that people who go out of their way to get more Likes are more likely to have lower self-esteem and trust people less.

Why 3,000 (More) People Won’t Fix Facebook’s Violent Video Problem

Facebook has a video problem. Certain clips recently posted by users have been horrifically violent, such as live videos posted last week in which a man in Thailand reportedly killed his infant daughter and then himself. And they aren’t always removed from the site quickly, either, which means many people may end up seeing them.

In an effort to get this content off Facebook faster, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Wednesday that the social network will make it easier for users to report inappropriate videos, and it is hiring more people to review such reports. The team, called community operations, will grow by 3,000, Zuckerberg said; it currently has 4,500 people reviewing the millions of reports that Facebook gets weekly.

Zuckerberg said the additional manpower will help Facebook remove videos with content including hate speech and exploitation of children.

The move comes as the latest attempt by the social network to fix the issue (see “Offensive Content Still Plagues Facebook”). Two months ago Facebook announced tools it hoped would prevent people from killing themselves on live videos (see “Big Questions Around Facebook’s Suicide Prevention Tools”). Since launching Facebook Live, which lets users broadcast live videos to friends on Facebook, about a year ago, several people have killed themselves via streaming video.

Such moves may not be enough to stanch the flow of violent videos—both streamed live via Facebook Live and in those that are recorded and then uploaded—that are posted to the site, though. There are nearly two billion people using Facebook at this point, and a recent tally by the Wall Street Journal found that at least 50 violent acts have been streamed just via Facebook Live since it was launched a year ago.

This number is almost certain to increase if more Facebook users gravitate to making and watching videos, and chances are they will. In the company’s last quarterly conference call, back in February, Zuckerberg called video a “megatrend,” and, more widely, a recent report from Cisco indicated that mobile video traffic now makes up 60 percent of all mobile data traffic.

The use of artificial intelligence tools could help—Facebook is already adept at using AI to do things like figure out who specific people are in the photos you upload—but even Zuckerberg believes that’s a long way off.

In a long piece he posted to the social network in February, he said the company is looking into technology that can automatically flag photos and videos that shouldn’t be on the site, and said about a third of the reports to Facebook’s content-reviewing team currently come from AI-based alerts.

“It will take many years to fully develop these systems,” he said.

For now, at least, Zuckerberg is hoping that people can do the job that technology can’t. On Wednesday, he tried to point to a bright spot, though, saying that a week earlier the company was able to help stop someone from committing suicide on live video, as the company contacted police in response to a user report.

“In other cases, we weren’t so fortunate,” he said.