As I am sure many of you know, Facebook has been in the media and on the news lately-- and not for a good reason.
Facebook Live was created about a year ago. Here, Facebook users can record and share videos live to all those they are friends with and the public. When Mark Zuckerberg created this, he said it was "like having a TV in your pocket." This gives people the ability to broadcast from anywhere about anything.
Of course, Facebook has its rules about what it allows to be on the social network, however, there have recently been some issues with that.
In the past couple of weeks and over this year of existence, people have broadcasted disturbing things online using Facebook live. This include beating people up, murder and suicide. The most recent incidents involved the "Facebook Killer" who used Facebook live to show him gunning down and killing an elderly man at random. Another incident involved a man who killed himself while on Facebook live due to a breakup, while another showed a man killing his 11-month-old daughter.
There have been reports that it took Facebook about 3 hours to remove some of these horrific videos.
Now, I understand that Facebook has standards and tries to act as quickly as possible to these tragic events being posted, but I feel like more needs to be done. Maybe if this was a one time thing it would be different, however, this has happened multiple times. All Facebook has managed to do about it is remove the videos. Except they don't seem to be removing them very fast. I'm not a tech person, but I feel like Facebook should have figured something out by now to either prevent these videos from being posted or being removed in a quick fashion.
With technology and social media today, everyone can be a journalist. Everyone is free to share and post whatever they want, depending on the sites guidelines. However, with Facebook live specifically, over this past year there have been dozens of deaths that have been broadcasted for the world to see. Facebook live is a cool, fun way to entertain people and create videos, but I feel like the cons are starting to outweigh the pros.
The media only hears about some of the incidents, but if you were to Google "Facebook live" a bunch of responses would come up-- and it is not what you would think.
This is from my own personal Google search. The first thing to pop up should not be death or suicide. Our world is becoming worse and worse, and the use of social media is only making that more known to everyone around the world.
Social media platforms, especially Facebook at the moment, need to up their game on what is posted on their sites and how. Certain actions on social media need to not be available to users anymore, more serious guidelines or more people on the inside monitoring things being posted to make sure these are being removed.
Personally, I am saddened to be in a generation that relies so heavily on social media, especially because it has been shown how people can abuse it.
Facebook, get your act together please to stop these inhumane and horrific things from being posted.
