Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved quickly to get live video up and running in 2016 but the 32-year-old billionaire wasn't prepared for the difficult task of dealing with users posting videos containing violent acts, the Wall Street Journal reports.
"It wasn't immediately clear that [Facebook Live] was going to be used in these ways," said a former employee about a video posted by Diamond Reynolds of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, dying after he had been shot by police officers in Minnesota during a routine traffic stop.
Added a person familiar with the development of Facebook Live: the company "didn't grasp the gravity of the medium" during the planning stages.
Zuckerberg last month said, "in the last year, the complexity of the issues we've seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community," including its handling of some videos.
"We saw this in errors taking down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in removing the historical Terror of War photo from Vietnam. We've seen this in misclassifying hate speech in political debates in both directions – taking down accounts and content that should be left up and leaving up content that was hateful and should be taken down. Both the number of issues and their cultural importance has increased recently.
This has been painful for me because I often agree with those criticizing us that we're making mistakes."
University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks told the WSJ Facebook was naïve about how its product would be used.
"If you can't get a handle on it, maybe the answer is not to introduce that particular technology," she said.
Facebook Live has not worked out in Zuckerberg's favor yet, and has cost the company money – the Wall Street Journal last June reported Facebook agreed to make payments totaling more than $50 million to video creators like BuzzFeed, the New York Times, Vox Media and Mashable to keep users engaged.
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