Facebook’s ‘Live’ problem

Facebook has deployed 3,000 additional employees to monitor its “Facebook Live” feature, with the hope of heading off the tragedies that seem to be invading our timelines with increasing frequency. This week it hit home, with the “live” suicide of a Mashpee man, who killed himself with friends and acquaintances watching.

And while 3,000 monitors sounds impressive we haven’t the first clue whether it’s enough. We do know for certain those cubicle-dwellers in Silicon Valley won’t be able to stop every person intent on broadcasting a suicide, or a violent act against another person, everywhere in the world. If the feature is available, it will occasionally be used for nefarious intent.

This is real-life Truman Show stuff, and Facebook is taking a rather bloodless approach to addressing it.

No, the social media site didn’t cause the death of this man, or any of the others. These are disturbed individuals. The company says it has implemented new tools to help people report abuses of the real-time video portal.

But Facebook, and its peer sites, have managed to create a virtual world in which nothing feels real and yet everything feels real — from the heartwarming video of a soldier’s homecoming to the murder of an innocent, elderly man in Cleveland.

Creating a “report abuse” button is easy. Pushing an ad for a suicide hotline is easy, too. But as in real life, it will be up to the rest of the site’s users to keep an eye on our friends and neighbors and to reach out to them and to the authorities if something is amiss.