Facebook to hire team to detect violent videos

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Facebook will hire 3,000 workers tasked with quickly removing violent videos from the site, the company said Wednesday.

The announcement follows a string of distressing incidents in which videos of murders, suicides and sexual assaults were posted on the social media site, with much of the violence being streamed in real time to viewers via Facebook Live.

About 40 people watched live in March as six teenagers brutally raped a 15-year-old girl in Chicago. In April, a Cleveland man posted a video of himself fatally shooting a 74-year-old victim. Soon after, a man in Thailand posted a video of himself murdering his infant daughter before committing suicide.

Many of the videos were available online for nearly 24 hours before Facebook found them and removed them from the site. Facebook has largely utilized artificial intelligence to detect such posts, but critics say those automated efforts have clearly failed.

“If we're going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a post on Facebook. “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.”

The rise of filmed violence is causing a crisis for Facebook and the new hiring spree is the biggest commitment the company has yet made to halt the gruesome trend.

“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. “As these become available they should help make our community safer.”

Facebook did not clarify if the workers would work from Facebook’s California headquarters or if the work would be outsourced to contractors in other countries.