Facebook Live Killings Research Writing Assignment

Facebook Live Killings
Since its creation in 2004, Facebook already has 2 billion monthly users as per Mark Zuckerberg, founder, and CEO, in a CNBC article published on June 2017. The Article further says that Facebook is shifting its focus from connecting the world to bringing the world closer. They want to emphasize the `Good` in Facebook (Balakrishnan, 2017). Will this shift greatly affect the posts we would see on Facebook? We can only know by time. Although Facebook indeed has connected the world, it has its downside. Negative posts and crime related posts are rampant in the Facebook world, especially when the Facebook Live feature came in. According to the article in The Guardian by Solon, this feature is supposed to be used as a tool to share your heartwarming life moments by broadcasting live videos directly from your smartphones but it had also gained a reputation in a different light. Some of the posts that went viral were child abuses, the musings of a spree killer as the police were on the chase, a young man with disabilities in Chicago being tortured, and the rape of a woman in Sweden. As per the article, the criminals are drawn to posting their criminal acts via Facebook live due to the allure of having a big audience to brag it out (Solon, 2017). Since its public access on January 2016, Facebook live has also been used for a number of live murders and suicides. Some of these are the suicides of the Turkish man Erdogan Ceren, Jared McLemore, who torched himself to death in Memphis, Tennessee, and James M. Jeffrey, who shot himself in Robertsdale, Alabama. A Thai father, Wuttisan Wotanglay, hanged his 11 month old child in Phuket, Thailand when he accused his partner of cheating then killed himself. The 37-year old Steve Stephens also filmed himself murdering the 74-year old Robert Goodwin in Cleveland, Ohio then shot himself while on the run from the police (Harper and Mullin, 2017).
Legally, we cannot hold Facebook accountable for these as they were not the ones who committed the crimes. Yet they became the platform for these crimes to be broadcasted. Deontology, a duty-based ethics would dictate that Facebook needs to do the right thing. And the right thing to do, other than removing the post or blocking the livestream, is to help rescue the victims or track down the perpetrators. Although Facebook has been very cooperative with police agencies to help solve the crimes streamed and posted on their page, it is still not enough. They should do an action at the moment when the livestream is ongoing, which would be difficult to do because of the billions of people using it. Currently, Facebook still does not have any system effective enough to detect and remove offensive content without human intervention. Their system is dependent on the other users to report and flag it. Only then can their Community Operations team take action (Crossley, 2017). Yet, in an effort to curb live suicides they started using “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology around November 2017. This will detect patterns of suicidal thoughts from all posts then send it to prevention-trained human moderators to take action rather than wait for users to report them. The moderators will then contact their partner agencies to respond accordingly (Constine, 2017). Hopefully, this feature will not only prevent suicides, but could be expanded by helping to detect the acts of committing murder, rape, and abuse in the future, therefore, they can act on them before the crime escalates.
Since Facebook caters to a large number of different kinds of people all over the world, they need to be more proactive and thorough in choosing contents that will be posted on their site. As of May 2017, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that they would hire 3,000 more employees in addition to the 4,500 that they already have to review the bulk of reports that come in millions every week that would violate their terms of service. He hopes that this move would speed up the process of identifying the inappropriate post. This would also mean that it would increase the chances of ...