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Live Footage of Shootings Forces Facebook to Confront New Role

SAN FRANCISCO — Late Thursday evening, when sniper fire rang out across downtown Dallas, a bystander, Michael Kevin Bautista, used his smartphone to stream the events in real time on Facebook Live. Within the hour, CNN was rebroadcasting the footage.

The day before, Diamond Reynolds streamed on Facebook Live after local police in Falcon Heights, Minn., shot her boyfriend, Philando Castile, ratcheting up a controversy surrounding how police officers treat African-Americans.

The two real-time videos catapulted Facebook, in the span of 48 hours, into a spot as the prime forum for live events and breaking news. It is a position that the company has long jockeyed to be in as it seeks to keep its 1.65 billion members ever more engaged.

Yet the brutal nature of the events that appeared on Facebook Live also put the company in a tricky situation.

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Chaos After the Gunshots in Dallas

Five Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded, along with two civilians, in a sniper attack during a demonstration on Thursday night against police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana.

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Five Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded, along with two civilians, in a sniper attack during a demonstration on Thursday night against police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana.CreditCredit...LM Otero/Associated Press

Facebook is confronting complexities with live videos that it may not have anticipated just a few months ago, when the streaming service was dominated by lighter fare such as a Buzzfeed video of an exploding watermelon. Now Facebook must navigate when, if at all, to draw the line if a live video is too graphic, and weigh whether pulling such content is in the company’s best interests if the video is newsworthy.

“There are a handful of companies at the moment in a position to offer a live-streaming service where individual broadcasts are easily discoverable and shareable,” said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard University. “It just puts companies in positions they weren’t designed to deal with well.”

In a Facebook post on Thursday before the Dallas police shootings, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote about Ms. Reynolds’s live broadcast. While the images of Mr. Castile dying “are graphic and heartbreaking,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, such videos also “shine a light on the fear that millions of members of our community live with every day.” He did not address what Facebook’s greater role in policing that content will be in the future.

On Friday, a Facebook spokeswoman said the company understood the “unique challenges of live video” and the importance of having “a responsible approach.” It does not cross a line when someone who witnesses a shooting uses Facebook Live to raise awareness or find the perpetrator, she said, but if that video was used for mocking or celebratory purposes, then it would be removed.

Anyone in the United States with a Facebook account and a smartphone can begin live streaming. The video is instantly broadcast to the person’s news feed where friends and followers can immediately view the video.

Facebook said the service follows its community guidelines, which outline what the company permits on the site. Under the guidelines, Facebook largely relies on its members to identify and take down inappropriate content.

Flagged material is sent to a team of Facebook employees, who can take some actions, including interrupting an inappropriate live stream or calling local law enforcement in the case of a dangerous or illegal event. Facebook said it can also add warnings to graphic videos after they are recorded — as it did with Ms. Reynolds’s video — and is able to restrict graphic videos to users over 18 years old.

Those conventions are similar to guidelines set by other websites that host user-generated content, such as Reddit and Twitter’s Periscope.

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Protests in Dallas

Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched through the streets of Dallas on Thursday.

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Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched through the streets of Dallas on Thursday.

Facebook has shown signs that it may still be trying to figure out how to handle the reach of its content. After Ms. Reynolds’s video of Mr. Castile’s shooting was posted, it was taken down by Facebook for a few hours with no explanation. Facebook blamed a technical glitch for the video’s removal, but declined to speak further to the incident. In June, Facebook twice removed a user’s post in support of victims of the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., which the company also characterized as an error.

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said companies with live-streaming and large audiences have a responsibility to inform the public and its users about potential repercussions.

“Companies and platforms are going to have to educate people about how their videos are going to have a big impact,” he said.

Facebook Live only recently became a tool for people to take part as witnesses. Facebook pays a number of publishers, including The New York Times, to create live broadcasts.

Facebook is racing to catch up to, and ultimately surpass, Twitter. Twitter was key in distributing news and images from the social unrest that unfolded in Ferguson, Mo., starting in 2014.

“It does feel like a critical point, a tipping point, in the public’s ability to both use and respond to live, eyewitness media,” Mr. Shapiro said.

Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco, and Sydney Ember from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Facebook Live Videos Pose Tangle of Questions. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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