Murder on Facebook raises big censorship questions
Source: Angelo Young
On Easter Sunday horrific footage of a 74-year-old man being gunned down on a Cleveland sidewalk was posted on Facebook by his killer, reigniting an ongoing debate over how social-media content should be policed.
But effective strategies for blocking every piece of offensive and illegal content have been elusive and may never be 100 percent effective, according to some experts. Others — including Facebook itself — say more can and should be done to root out offensive content, including hate speech, horrific and illegal snuff videos and fake news items that mold the opinions of gullible users.
Facebook says it receives millions of complaints objecting to content every week from its nearly 2 billion active users. When the company receives a complaint, an algorithm automatically flags the content, which is then reviewed by moderators to quickly determine if it violates the law or the company’s terms and conditions.
Footage of the murder of Robert Godwin Sr. by deranged killer Steve Stephens, 37, who committed suicide on Tuesday following a police chase in Pennsylvania, was publicly viewable on Stephens’ Facebook profile for about two hours on Sunday. Facebook said it disabled Stephens’ account 23 minutes after it received reports of the murder video, but it was publicly viewable long enough for users to capture the footage, prompting a plea on Twitter from one of Godwin’s grandchildren for people to stop sharing the video.
Desmond Patton, an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, said that while the Godwin murder video should clearly have been taken down, it one extreme example of a larger issue. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google (which owns YouTube), he said, need to recruit specialists and elicit feedback from community leaders to improve how content is moderated, including material that might not seem offensive to every user.
“I study violence on social media and all of the [problematic] content that I see almost never gets taken down,” Patton told Salon. “If you’re just using tech people from Silicon Valley [as content monitors,] you’re going to miss a lot of things. You need to diversify who makes these decisions.”
Facebook declined to comment to Salon about the strategies it’s considering to fortify its efforts to block objectionable and illegal content uploaded by its users, but having a more aggressive content filtering system could have unintended consequences. For example, would a stricter policy lead to the censorship of footage like the July 2016 shooting of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer? It could be argued that this video serves the public’s interest because it viscerally highlights the ongoing problem of excessive force inflicted on African-Americans by members of law enforcement.
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