In March this year, the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl by as many as six people was broadcast live on Facebook. What was most disturbing about the crime was that, according to the Chicago police, at least 40 people watched the gruesome crime but not one of them reported it.
Back home, Arjun Bhardwaj, a 20-year-old from Bengaluru, committed suicide jumping from a building in Mumbai last month, after posting a video on Facebook.
These are just two of the incidents revealing a morbid practice that is being seen increasingly across the world – of people livestreaming their attempts at harming themselves or others.
With the trend growing alarmingly, it’s finally caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Co-Founder, who announced on Wednesday that the social media platform would hire 3,000 more people to monitor such content and get help to people who need it.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote that watching people hurt themselves or others on Facebook was “heartbreaking” and that if he wanted to build a “safe community”, he’d have 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,” he wrote.
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,’ Zuckerberg added.
He stated that this would help Facebook remove content which promotes hate speech and child exploitation. He said that they would also work with law enforcement to facilitate help to someone who needs it.
“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,” Zuckerberg said.
Citing an incident where Facebook employees secured help for a user who said they were considering suicide on Facebook live, Zuckerberg said that no one should have to be in such a position. “But if they are, then we should build a safe community that gets them the help they need,” he said.