Daily Times

Posting a smartphone video online has never been so easy—even if the video shows a murder. After two recent cases that shocked the world, this has become a tricky but urgent problem for Facebook to tackle.

On Monday, a 20-year-old Thai man broadcast live video  on the world’s most popular social media platform, showing him killing his baby daughter before his own suicide.

The previous week, a US man dubbed the “Facebook Killer” fatally shot himself after three days of a frantic nationwide manhunt.

Steve Stephens, 37, had posted a video on Easter Sunday, saying he intended to kill. He followed up two minutes later with video showing the fatal shooting of an elderly grandfather whom he had seemingly chosen at random in Cleveland, Ohio.

In a third video 11 minutes later, streamed live from Stephens’ car, he said he intended to kill others.

Facebook denounced the “horrific crime,” saying it had “no place” on its platform. But the video of the shooting wasn’t taken down by Facebook for more than two hours after it was posted. The Thai murder video remained on Facebook for close to 24 hours.

Critics say the social media giant has been too slow to react, and questioned whether Facebook Live—a strategic area of development for the company—should be disabled.

After the Cleveland killing, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg pledged to “keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.”

But he conceded: “There is a lot of work to do here.”

Facebook’s video functions have also been used to broadcast rapes. This week, three men in Sweden were sentenced to prison for gang-raping a woman and live-streaming the attack.

Other shocking content includes the suicides of young people who broadcast their deaths on Facebook Live or competing applications like Twitter’s Periscope and Live.me.

Any online platform that lets users freely publish content will face these problems, but Facebook is particularly vulnerable given its huge user base, said Lou Kerner, a partner at Flight VC and a social media specialist. Facebook had 1.86 billion users as of the end of December.

There are no “easy answers,” he said. “They’re going to struggle to stop it from occurring. The question is how fast they can take it down.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to “keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening”

Most social networks ban violent and shocking content, but given the volume of postings, they mostly rely on users to identify and report them.