Getty Image
After witnessing numerous cases of violence, including murder, broadcast on Facebook Live recently the company’s Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today issued a statement.
Incidents such as the murder committed by Steve Stephens in Cleveland, as well as a fatal shooting in Chicago and the murder of a child in Thailand mean drastic changes are in store for the streaming service.
Zuckerberg stated in Wednesday’s announcement that Facebook will be adding 3,000 new reviewers over the next year to help moderate videos and reports.
“Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen people hurting themselves and others on Facebook — either live or in video posted later. It’s heartbreaking, and I’ve been reflecting on how we can do better for our community.
If we’re going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly. We’re working to make these videos easier to report so we can take the right action sooner — whether that’s responding quickly when someone needs help or taking a post down.
Over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world — on top of the 4,500 we have today — to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.
These reviewers will also help us get better at removing things we don’t allow on Facebook like hate speech and child exploitation. And we’ll keep working with local community groups and law enforcement who are in the best position to help someone if they need it — either because they’re about to harm themselves, or because they’re in danger from someone else.
In addition to investing in more people, we’re also building better tools to keep our community safe. We’re going to make it simpler to report problems to us, faster for our reviewers to determine which posts violate our standards and easier for them to contact law enforcement if someone needs help. As these become available they should help make our community safer.
This is important. Just last week, we got a report that someone on Live was considering suicide. We immediately reached out to law enforcement, and they were able to prevent him from hurting himself. In other cases, we weren’t so fortunate.
No one should be in this situation in the first place, but if they are, then we should build a safe community that gets them the help they need.”
Sounds like a solid plan. Let’s hope it works.
Then if we can also get people to stop live-streaming their own deaths we’ll really have something.
[protected-iframe id=”fb8b6dc64176944fea60d3143784ff66-97886205-92827192″ info=”cdn-images.mailchimp.com/embedcode/slim-10_7.css” ]