Video of a Cleveland man shooting another man stayed up on Facebook for close to two hours Sunday before the company realized it was there and took it down.
Following video of a murder, Facebook says it needs to move faster to remove violent content
Video of the close-range shooting was on the network for nearly two hours before it was taken down.
David Ramos / Getty
That’s too slow, according to Facebook’s VP of Global Operations, Justin Osofsky, who published a blog post Monday evening detailing the events and how Facebook responded to them.
Facebook said that it didn’t receive the first report about the video — which showed a man being shot at close range — until an hour and 50 minutes after the incident. Less than 20 minutes after the video of the murder was uploaded, someone reported a separate, five-minute Facebook Live video of the suspect confessing to the crime. A third video, showing the suspect declaring his intent to kill the victim, was uploaded to Facebook but not reported by users, and was discovered after the killing.
It took Facebook almost two hours to remove the suspect’s account after that live video confession.
“We know we need to do better,” Osofsky wrote.
Facebook says that it’s going to be “reviewing our reporting flows to be sure people can report videos and other material that violates our standards as easily and quickly as possible.” Right now, Facebook doesn’t hunt down violent or inappropriate content; it waits until someone flags it as inappropriate before acting.
Osofsky also mentioned the possibility of using artificial intelligence to keep people from sharing graphic portions of a video in the future, and to more quickly remove videos once they’re flagged. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February that the company is working on AI to help detect video content, though he says that is “very early in development.”
Though the murder was not committed on live video, the confession was; early news reports inaccurately said that the killing was recorded live. This seemed possible, as Facebook has dealt with a number of violent or disturbing live videos in the past.
That got us thinking today that Facebook should reconsider who has access to its broadcasting feature.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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