14 DAY TRIAL // Three days after a man called Steve Stephens went live on Facebook killing one man and bragging about other killings, the suspect shot and killed himself on Tuesday morning.
Stephens reportedly gave himself away after stopping for fast food and got recognized by an employee. The police were tipped off, and a chase began, which ended with Stephens pulling over and turning the gun on himself.
Stephens had been on the run for close to three days after filming himself shooting and killing a complete stranger and posting the video on Facebook. In a Facebook Live rant, he blamed his actions on an ex-lover and claimed to have killed 13 people with more murders on the way until he was caught. The police, however, claim there was no evidence of these murders.
The incident raised a lot of questions regarding Facebook's actions against such videos. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, acknowledged the situation during a talk on Tuesday, but he didn't really offer any solutions. He did admit, however, that there was more to be done.
"We have a lot of work, and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening," he said.
A Facebook problem
That being said, the company released a timeline of the Cleveland shooting videos in order to clear things up a bit after receiving a lot of backlash for taking too long to take down the gruesome videos.
“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. In this case, 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,” Justin Osofsky, Facebook VP of global operations, wrote in a statement.
The first video, where Stephens expressed his intent to murder, was posted at 11.09 AM PDT, but it was not reported. At 11.11 AM PDT, the video of the shooting was uploaded. At 11.22 AM PDT, Stephens went Live for five minutes and shortly after it had ended, the first report came in. At 12.59 PM PDT, the first report of the shooting video was sent to Facebook. By 1.22 PDT, the suspect's account had been disabled, and all videos became invisible.
Obviously, there's a problem with Facebook's systems here. While the Live video was reported, the video of the shooting remained online for more than two hours before it was taken down.
“Artificial intelligence, for example, plays an important part in this work, helping us prevent the videos from being reshared in their entirety. (People are still able to share portions of the videos in order to condemn them or for public awareness, as many news outlets are doing in reporting the story online and on television),” Osofsky said.