But, after years of doing this work, Jay knew that the video would continue to spread in dark corners of Facebook, along with praise for the massacre. During the “understand” phase, Facebook determined that the video qualified as terrorist content under its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, which bans “organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence.” Jay’s team removed the video, and, as soon as the gunman’s identity was confirmed, removed his account. (The company has developed some technology that can detect certain themes or imagery in live video and block them immediately.) Viewers are not always civic-minded four thousand people watched the video of the Christchurch shooting before it was taken down, but no one flagged it until twenty-nine minutes after the live stream began. But since live video, by definition, has not been banned before, Facebook mostly relies on users to flag inappropriate posts to moderators. Facebook is able to screen most photos and videos with an artificial-intelligence system, which makes sure that they haven’t been previously banned and automatically deletes those that have.
A number of people-sadly, many of them young-have streamed their suicides. In 2017, a group of teen-agers kidnapped and tortured a man with mental and developmental disabilities and streamed video of the event to their friends. Since its early days, it has been used to share the antics of children with their grandparents, broadcast amateur cooking shows, and record academic panels, but it has also been exploited to showcase violence. “It’s not something I would ask others to do without having to watch it myself,” he said.įacebook Live was launched in 2016, and we are still grappling with the possibilities of the medium.
Jay forced himself to watch the video, and then to watch it again. Jay learned that the shooter seemed to be trying to make the massacre go viral: he had posted links to a seventy-three-page manifesto, in which he espoused white-supremacist beliefs, and live-streamed one of the shootings on Facebook, in a video that lasted seventeen minutes and then remained on his profile. The moderators have a three-step crisis-management protocol in the first phase, “understand,” they spend as much as an hour gathering information before making any decisions. When the shooting happened, a dozen content moderators on the global escalations team were working in Singapore, and Jay messaged them to get an update. The Internet doesn’t run on a tight nine-to-five schedule, so Facebook maintains branches of the escalations team around the world, which work eight-hour shifts that “follow the sun,” so that someone is always on call to manage a crisis.
This may explain why Jay has the permanently tired look of a much older man. “There’s a spiritual resiliency they need to have to do the work,” Jay told me. This work takes a toll on moderators, and Jay’s team is focussed on the most virulent content. These posts range from the mundane (teen-agers reporting pictures in which they think they look fat neighbors reporting each other while squabbling over politics in a comments section) to the grotesque (a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel), exploitative (revenge porn posted by a jilted lover), illegal (communications about a drug deal using an invented language of numbers and emojis), and exhaustingly hateful (threads praising 9/11 or calling for the extermination of people with autism or hereditary baldness, and a seemingly endless stream of racist vitriol).
At Facebook, human content moderators, assisted by computers, spend their days sifting through posts that users have reported. In 2015, he left a position working on intellectual-property operations at Facebook to run a new department known as the global-escalations team, which removes heinous images and videos from the platform. Jay, whose name has been changed to protect his security, is a lawyer by training. “As soon as I saw the news about the attack that night, I knew immediately this was going to be something my team would be working on,” he told me. Unlike most people, Jay couldn’t dwell on his feelings of despair. This turned out to be the second of two shootings, during which the gunman killed fifty people and injured another fifty before being arrested. On his Facebook feed, he learned that, roughly two hours before, a man had entered a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and opened fire. His kids were in bed, and he had just turned on a cooking show on Netflix and pulled out his work laptop to send some e-mails. on March 14th, Jay, a thirty-eight-year-old Facebook employee with parted hair and perpetual stubble, was sitting in his living room, in Austin, Texas.
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