Facebook Killed Its Live Video Map Without Any Notification, How Come?

If you visited the map on Facebook, you would have seen see several blue dots that the social network scatters around the world. And live videos would pop up each time the user clicked on them.

Freelance meteorologist Timothy Ballisty used to view this map during snowstorms, hurricane, and tornadoes with the aim of catching a glimpse of what was going on in real time. Earlier this month, he noticed that the map was no longer there. Turns out, late last year, Facebook quietly removed the feature, but it wasn’t until recently that Ballisty, as well as other users, noticed.

Now, the link for this defunct map directs users to Facebook Watch, the video hub that the social giant has long tried to make its users engaged to. According to the aforementioned meteorologist, it’s now harder to find the wanted live videos as he has to follow certain pages for storm hunters rather than just browsing the map.

Ballisty expressed his shock ar the removal of the live map as he considered it a "very useful feature."

The disappearance of the feature apparently bothers Ballisty, and he’s not the only one. Several users turned to Facebook’s help forum to query about what happened to the live video map. They also asked the social platform to bring it back. Some users think that the map was gone because Facebook didn’t want users to see violent content on its network, which has long been an unsolved issue.

The removal of the map surfaces at a time when the society is having concerns over live videos on Facebook. The tool was initially meant to share stunts or personally important events but has turned into a convenient way for spreading violent content. In March, after the removal, a terror suspect livestreamed his shooting in New Zealand on Facebook. So it appears that just removing the live video map is not enough to tackle the problem of violence across the platform.

As stated by a spokeswoman from Facebook, the platform deleted the map to consolidate its video pages, saying that the map had low usage without revealing statistics. She also denied that the removal of the map was due to privacy and safety concerns.

Other sites have similar maps, but with 2.38 billion monthly users, it’s harder for Facebook to police the amount of violent content across its site compared with counterparts like Twitter and Snapchat. YouTube, with 2 billion monthly users, lets users discover live videos too but it does not have a dedicated map.