World News

Facebook to Hire Thousands of Employees to Review Live Videos

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Tony Maples Photography

 

When Facebook premiered their “Live” feature, where users can livestream their day through the Facebook app, they didn’t anticipate how many employees they would need to police the videos. Due to suicides, murders (like the recent incident in Cleveland), and a combination of both (last week a man in Thailand killed himself and his 11-month-old on film), Facebook knew they needed to step up their security to shut down the violent streams.

Fox 29 writes that Facebook plans to add 3,000 jobs for Live video monitoring in addition to the 4,500 positions they already have in place. Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Wednesday says that they’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.”

The LA Times points out that the company must figure out how to regulate the videos since some violent content is OK to document, and there’s no way of knowing what will happen next in a livestreamed video. But they know they need to act faster to take down videos where awful events take place like a murder or suicide, especially since the harrowing video from Thailand was up for viewing for a full 24 hours.