Facebook responds to brutal crime video: 'We know we need to do better'
Facebook loves video. Facebook also loves money. Video is bringing in money, also.
But Facebook is starting to realize—finally—that not every video's worth hosting. No matter how many views it gets.
On Monday, a day after a video went viral on Facebook for showing a murder in Cleveland, Facebook issued an apology about its own failure in reporting the crime.
The incident was the most recent in a series of videos of violent crimes (as well as one particularly brutal example of suicide) that have ended up either livestreamed or uploaded to Facebook.
"We disabled the suspect’s account within 23 minutes of receiving the first report about the murder video, and two hours after receiving a report of any kind. But we know we need to do better," Juston Osofsky, Facebook's VP of Global Operations, wrote in a blog post.
Facebook's recap of the incident:
On Sunday morning, a man in Cleveland posted a video of himself announcing his intent to commit murder
then two minutes later posted another video of himself shooting and killing an elderly man.
A few minutes after that, he went live, confessing to the murder.
It was a horrific crime — one that has no place on Facebook, and goes against our policies and everything we stand for.
Various initial news stories had misreported what videos were posted when and which were livestreamed on Facebook. In response to these reports, Facebook issued a timeline clarifying what happened and when.
To be sure, it's not Facebook's fault that someone killed someone and that people saw the event on Facebook. The site offers an ability for users—all nearly 2 billion of them—to report a post for violating Facebook's Community Standards, which condemn violence.
But no one reported it quickly, according to Facebook's blog post: "We did not receive a report about the first video, and we only received a report about the second video—containing the shooting—more than an hour and 45 minutes after it was posted. We received reports about the third video, containing the man’s live confession, only after it had ended," the blog post reads.
Facebook does have a team of human moderators that actively monitor live videos if they reach a certain threshold, the company told Mashable earlier this year. But, in this case, that threshold was apparently not reached in time.
Still, Facebook said it will do better. "As a result of this terrible series of events, we are reviewing our reporting flows to be sure people can report videos and other material that violates our standards as easily and quickly as possible," the blog post reads.
That effort to do better also includes introducing more artificial intelligence into monitoring Facebook videos, since the site does receive so much content every minute that human moderators are not able to keep up—so they say. Whether or not those humans' A.I. counterparts will do any better remains to be seen.
Topics Facebook
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
