Social media monitoring intensifies – for good reason

The “town square” that the social media create in drawing together family, friends and neighbours occasionally gets some unwelcome visitors. There are those who come to express upsetting notions and some whose aim is to literally harm themselves and others in public. The noble goal of a unified global community is being challenged in unforeseen ways, most disturbingly though the abuse of “Facebook Live”.
To the murders “broadcast” live in Thailand and the United States via the video-sharing function this month is added the case of a girl in Pattaya cutting her wrists for all to see. She survived. Others have not. In Cleveland in the US, in a moment too brief for online administrators to react, a gunman held up his phone camera so that people could watch him kill an innocent passer-by. In Phuket, a man sought to punish his estranged wife by murdering their baby daughter on a live feed and then taking his own life.
Calls for closer monitoring of the social networks have never been louder. Facebook has responded by adding 3,000 more monitors to its battalion of contract workers watching for violent and inflammatory posts. It will have 7,500 people on the job, a number that should prompt other social media to do more in terms of content supervision.
Subjecting content to any form of control is always tricky and 
controversial, and meanwhile the social media deserve credit for  spreading news of general interest in addition to allowing individuals to stay in regular contact. But the sharing networks also aggravate differences in viewpoint, political, religious and otherwise. The “town square” isn’t always 
amicable, and the tragic abuses of Facebook Live have introduced a disturbing element that 
threatens to subvert community discourse.
Facebook has been urged to devote as much energy and time to monitoring as it does to rolling out new features. It insists it was not notified about the murder video in the US for nearly two hours and then swiftly moved to shut down the account, an action all but irrelevant by then.
With Facebook now taking steps to ensure more intensive monitoring, other companies should follow suit. 
The features that are most prone to abuse tend to be the ones that earn the most revenue, whereas monitoring is costly and yields no economic return. Despite this, Facebook has pledged to create an overall “safer environment” for live feeds, and new innovations in artificial intelligence should be able to block or minimise undesirable posts, live streams and uploads.
Monitoring social-media content is easier said than done, of course. It should be kept in mind that blaming the sharing networks for incidents like these is akin to blaming the highway for a traffic accident. Much of the onus rests on the users to enforce ethics in an era where ethical lines are more blurred every day. The Internet’s rosy “future” has disappeared, the giddy euphoria of the early days in social media now held in check by human foibles and frailties.