A few months ago, Facebook changed its default settings to enable auto-play of video content on the social network’s news feed, whether users accessed the site on a desktop browser or through its mobile app. Even though the latter has auto-play enabled by default with an “only on Wi-Fi” asterisk, the change has swept through millions of news feeds, perhaps as a way to ease users into Facebook’s video advertising initiative.
Now, users are calling that default video-play toggle into question thanks to a rise in disturbing content distributed via social media. Should an ISIS beheading or similarly disturbing content find its way to someone’s Facebook news feed while that user hasn’t opted out of the site’s video feature—a process possibly more complicated than it needs to be—they’re in for a rude awakening.
It’s tough to catalog exactly how many gore-filled videos have been successfully circulated via Facebook without the site intervening or taking them down. Publicly, Facebook representatives have argued that such content isn’t subject to removal. And as an example of video auto-play gone wrong, Ars readers directed us to a gory video posted to Facebook that had yet to receive any form of takedown in over a week. Its opening moment features the mass execution of children, all shot by a machine gun, and we chose not to watch the entire video (nor link to it) to see how much worse it got.
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