Social media giant hit over slow removal

‘I’M JUST MASSACRING PEOPLE,’ HE LAUGHED

IT TOOK two hours and 11 minutes for Facebook to remove Steve Stephens’ murder video on Sunday, a delay critics and the social media giant found unacceptable.

“We know we need to do better,” said Justin Osofsky, the company’s vice president of global operations.

The company said Stephens posted his first video voicing his intent to kill someone at 2:09 p.m., but no users reported it.

Stephens then uploaded his horrific video showing the street slaying of 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. at 2:11 p.m. and used Facebook Live to confess a few minutes after that, Osofsky said.

A user reported the shooting video at 3:59 p.m., and Facebook disabled Stephens’ account at 4:22 p.m., he said.

“It was a horrific crime — one that has no place on Facebook,” Osofsky said, adding that the company was “reviewing” the way it prioritizes reports from users and looking at new technologies such as artificial intelligence to improve its reaction time.

“(More than two) hours on the internet is an eternity,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth College, told the Daily News.

Farid, who helped develop a technology called PhotoDNA to stop the spread of child pornography online, said Facebook has largely “outsourced” the policing of its content to users and thirdparty moderators.

“They rely on the public to flag the content . . . . I find that a little inexcusable,” he said. “And Facebook has outsourced its moderation. I think it’s terribly understaffed — just enough to give lip service, but not enough to do the job right.”

Farid said the job of inspecting social media videos is enormous. Facebook handles more than a billion uploads a day.

“Maybe it’s not practical, but it’s not ridiculous. It’s not like you need 100,000 employees,” he said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February the company hoped to eventually use artificial intelligence to vet content for things like terrorist propaganda.

“We heard him say AI will fix our problems, but we have to be patient, it will take five or 10 years. I think that’s spectacularly naive,” Farid said Monday.

In the meantime, Farid called for a hybrid approach that includes more manpower used in conjunction with AI tools as they become available.