Millions of people have fallen foul of a new wave of Facebook Live videos which aren’t, in fact, live.
A number of Facebook accounts have started posting videos claiming that they are live when in fact they’re simply using looped recordings from the past.
Over six million people watched what they thought was an intrepid engineer change a lightbulb on the astonishing KDLT Radio tower in the US.
Unfortunately for them, the engineer had already changed the lightbulb, last year.
As another blow to the some 260,000 people that liked the ‘live’ video it did not, in fact take him four hours to scale the tower’s highest point. Instead the video appears to have looped the same 18 minute clip.
This isn’t the only time that a ‘live’ video has duped people into watching, the same Facebook account claimed to be showing live footage from a spacewalk on the International Space Station.
This too was indeed fake and again a long loop of a much shorter clip. Of course that didn’t stop some half a million people from tuning in and watching the video.
One of the key problems with this is that not only is it difficult to tell if some videos are going to become looped recordings but also the simple fact that Facebook is pushing Facebook Live a lot.
Any account you like or follow that starts a Facebook Live will immediately send out a wave of notifications, drawing users like a magnet to its content.