14 DAY TRIAL // In perhaps one of the most needed updates from Facebook these days, the company has announced that it will be adding 3,000 moderators after killings over Facebook Live have become entirely too frequent.
Over the past few months, there have been several high-profile incidents of violence unfolding live on Facebook. Therefore, the company is looking to employ 3,000 people to work on reviewing videos and other flagged reports, in an effort to clean up the network.
"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," Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post.
More people, more reporting tools
The 3,000 new employees will be joining the other 4,500 the company already has. Given there are now millions of reports the company gets every week, the process obviously needs to get speedier. A video of a man randomly killing another a few weeks ago remained on the platform for several hours before being taken down.
"These reviewers will also help us get better at removing things we don't allow on Facebook like hate speech and child exploitation. And we'll keep working with local community groups and law enforcement who are in the best position to help someone if they need it -- either because they're about to harm themselves, or because they're in danger from someone else," Zuckerberg explained.
He added that, on top of employing more people, the company is also building better tools to keep the community safe. Facebook has already made it easier for people to report problems, but they're also going to make it faster for reviewers to determine which posts violate the network's standards. They will also be able to contact law enforcement if someone needs help.
It seems the system is already working. Zuckerberg notes that last week a report came in that someone on Live was considering suicide. The company reached out to law enforcement and they were able to prevent this person from hurting himself. "In other cases, we weren't so fortunate," he gloomily adds.