The prevalence of acts of violence is becoming a larger problem on Facebook. Not only have shootings surfaced in video feeds on Facebook but recently acts of suicide have too. Most recently an Alabama man live-streamed his suicide on Facebook and that has law enforcement officials concerned others may take their lives this way unless the social media giant finds a way to stop or at least adequately monitor violence on its platform.
“The long-term solution is going to be having better artificial intelligence tools to give context of what’s going on,” Mark Zuckerberg said. “That won’t be this year, but I also don’t think that’s 10 years from now. I do think over a few-year period, this will get better.”
Thankfully when you look at the worldwide amount of users on Facebook you have to realize this is an extremely small sample size. We’re talking about over a billion. I’m not saying that makes even one incident showing up on the site OK but let’s give Facebook a tiny bit of credit here. The fact that the site can detect most of these incidents in minutes is a miracle in and of itself. A site this big is never going to be perfectly policed. We’re talking about a site that’s looking to be as big as the internet itself. Facebook is it’s own society and ecosystem. Just like any other society or world culture, we’re going to see incidents like this.
It’s hard to think of Facebook as another “World” but how else would you define it? It’s its own society. I’m fully confident that Zuckerberg will continue trying to make Facebook the utopia he envisions. Sadly that will never happen without steps in the wrong direction. Clearly these incidents are exactly that.
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