FACEBOOK founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is not finding recent happenings in Facebook funny. He is also not sitting idle and letting negative acts destroy the platform he created to serve humanity. He has vowed to defend the integrity of his platform.
Over the last few weeks, people have been seen hurting themselves and others on Facebook, either live or through videos. To this, Zuckerberg says, is heartbreaking and he has been reflecting on how to stop these, for a better community.
Zuckerberg has resorted to beefing up the number of administrators on Facebook to 750,000 so as to have enough manpower to review activities on the medium and react appropriately and timely. This means that additional 3,000 people will be added to the already 4,500 administrators handling Facebook affairs at the moment.
This is also as he apologized to Whatsapp users all over the world who experienced a temporary shutdown of the services on Wednesday. WhatsApp, a popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc, suffered a widespread global outage on Wednesday that lasted for several hours before being resolved.
The apology reads: “Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologise for the inconvenience.” WhatsApp was down in parts of India, Canada, the United States and Brazil, according to Reuters journalists. It affected people who use the service on Apple Inc’s iOS operating system, Alphabet Inc’s Android and Microsoft Corp’s Windows mobile OS.
In Brazil, where the professional class relies heavily on the messaging service, WhatsApp was down for about two and a half hours. Many users switched to rival system Telegram, which has picked up millions of customers in Brazil after two previous WhatsApp outages resulting from court orders. WhatsApp’s is used by more than 1.2 billion people around the world and is a key tool for communications and commerce in many countries. The service was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion.
On Facebook murder and threats, Zuckerberg in a statement, said: “If we’re going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly. We’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.
Over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world – on top of the 4,500 we have today – to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.
“These reviewers will also help us get better at removing things we don’t allow on Facebook like hate speech and child exploitation. And we’ll keep working with local community groups and law enforcement who are in the best position to help someone if they need it – either because they’re about to harm themselves, or because they’re in danger from someone else”.
He also added that “in addition to investing in more people, we’re also building better tools to keep our community safe. We’re going to make it simpler to report problems to us, faster for our reviewers to determine which posts violate our standards and easier for them to contact law enforcement if someone needs help. As these become available they should help make our community safer”.
He noted that all these measures were because last week, he got a report that someone went Live on the platform to confess he was considering suicide. However, Zuckerber said he and his team immediately reached out to law enforcement, and they were able to prevent him from hurting himself.
He also said that in other cases, they weren’t so fortunate, adding that “no one should be in this situation in the first place, but if they are, then we should build a safe community that gets them the help they need”.
