MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Facebook hires 3.000 people to help stop hate speech, abuse and self-harm broadcast on the website

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said it had been “heartbreaking” to see people “hurting themselves and others” in videos streamed live on Facebook.

Facebook is hiring 3,000 people for its “community operations team”, to help stop hate speech, child abuse and self-harm being broadcast on the website. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said it had been “heartbreaking” to see people “hurting themselves and others” in videos streamed live on Facebook.

 The move follows cases of murder and suicide being broadcast live on the social network. In April, a man was killed in a video streamed live on Facebook. Later in the same month, a Thai man killed his baby daughter and then himself in a live stream.

Mr Zuckerberg said the additional staff, joining the 4,500 existing people on the community operations team, would help the company respond more quickly when content was reported.

In a post on his Facebook profile, he said the company would develop new tools to manage the millions of content reports it received every week.

“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,” he said.

The post suggested Facebook's moderators would contact law enforcement, rather than contacting members directly if they were at risk of harm.

“Just last week, we got a report that someone on Live [video] was considering suicide. We immediately reached out to law enforcement, and they were able to prevent him from hurting himself”, said Mr Zuckerberg.

Facebook's profits have jumped in the first three months of the year, as the social network closes in on two billion users, according to its latest results.

In related news it was reported that Facebook profits increased 76% year-on-year to just over US$3bn in the period, helped mainly by higher advertising revenues, particularly on mobile.

It also said the number of people using Facebook on a monthly basis had increased to 1.94 billion, higher than experts had predicted.

“We had a good start to 2017,” said Zuckerberg. However, the company has come under sustained pressure in recent weeks over its handling of hate speech, child abuse and self-harm on the social network.

However Chief financial officer David Wehner said ad revenue growth would come down significantly over the rest of 2017, as Facebook hits a limit on the number of ads it can squeeze onto users' pages.