Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed the company’s failure to remove a page and event for a militia group in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on “largely an operational mistake,” CNBC reports.
Two people were killed at a Kenosha protest on Tuesday that took place in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.
Police arrested and charged 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Illinois with first-degree intentional homicide. He allegedly shot three people. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he considered himself a militia member trying to protect life and property.
Facebook removed the group from its platform on Wednesday, which is after The Verge found that at least two Facebook users had reported the group and the event to the company before the shooting took place on Tuesday.
Zuckerberg addressed employees about the mishap on Friday.
“The contractors and reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to basically didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said in a video to employees that made public on his Facebook profile. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”
Zuckerberg opted to make the video public after BuzzFeed wrote about the town hall meeting. The report noted that several employees criticized Zuckerberg for the company’s failure to remove the pages.
Zuckerberg said Facebook is now proactively looking for any content that praises the alleged shooter and the shooting.
“We’re going to continue to enforce our policies and continue evolving the policies to be able to identify more potential dangerous organizations and improve our execution in order to keep on getting ahead of this,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that this shows that there is a real risk and a continued increased risk through the election during this very sensitive and polarized and just highly charged time.”
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