Facebook to hire 3,000 more staff to police content – Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to hire an extra 3,000 staff worldwide to police content on Facebook.

The social network’s founder published – on his Facebook page – what amounted to a greater commitment to users’ safety following several “heartbreaking” instances of people hurting themselves or others in live, or recorded, videos in recent weeks.

He said the investment would include tackling hate speech and child exploitation.

Mr Zucerberg wrote: “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.

He added: “Just last week, we got a report that someone on (Facebook) Live was considering suicide.

“We immediately reached out to law enforcement, and they were able to prevent him from hurting himself. In other cases, we weren’t so fortunate.

“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.”

The statement will be largely seen as an admission by Facebook that action was overdue.

Last week, a father in Thailand broadcast himself killing his daughter on Facebook Live, according to police.

The company removed the video a day later after more than 370,000 views.

There have been many other examples including a live stream, in January, of a man with learning difficulties being bound, gagged and brutally punched.

Last month, a video was uploaded to Facebook of a man being shot dead in an unprovoked attack.

A report by a Commons committee on Monday recommended social media firms be fined if they failed to tackle illegal or harmful material.

Google has been at the centre of a boycott by advertisers – angered their messages have appeared alongside extremist content on the company’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

While Facebook-owned Whatsapp has come under separate pressure after it emerged Westminster terror attacker Khalid Masood sent an encrypted message via the messaging service just minutes before his assault began.