Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that his company will hire 3,000 people to review videos of crime and suicides following a series of tragic events that were broadcasted on Facebook Live.
The company already has 4,500 people reviewing such events; in a blog post Zuckerberg said he would increase the total to 7,500 staffers.
A murder in Cleveland and a killing of a baby in Thailand have recently made international news when they were shown live on the streaming service. These type of violent posts violate Facebook’s terms of service but they often go unnoticed until users report them directly to the company.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
Zuckerberg continued: “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.”
He said the new reviewers will also help the company remove things that Facebook doesn’t allow, including hate speech and child exploitation. Zuckerberg said he will keep working with local community groups and law enforcement to fix the problem.
The Facebook CEO stressed this is “important” and described an incident last week when the company received a report that someone on Facebook 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,” he said. “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.”