In May 2017, after a string of violent and viral Facebook Live videos, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be doubling down on its efforts to monitor Live content. This included hiring another 3,000 contractors — on top of an existing 4,500 — to watch for things like suicide, murder, and child exploitation. Which, as it turns out, still isn’t enough people policing Facebook Live videos to keep things from slipping through the cracks. Prentis Robinson, a musician from Atlanta, was killed on Monday after being shot while filming a Facebook Live video.
Robinson was filming himself using a selfie stick and was shot four times, the New York Daily News reports. He was shot near Wingate University’s campus in North Carolina, and the school was subsequently put on lockdown. The shooter is still at large. The Facebook Live in question appears to have been taken down, but his previous videos remain live and public on his profile page.
In April 2017, a Thai man killed his baby daughter by hanging her from a building in Phuket. He streamed the murder on Facebook Live and later killed himself. (He did not broadcast his suicide.) In May of the same year, Steve Stephens shot and killed an elderly man in Cleveland after getting into a fight with his girlfriend. He also used Facebook Live to stream the murder, and later killed himself in a standoff with police. Later that month, a Tennessee man died after lighting himself on fire in a Facebook Live video. After dousing himself in gasoline and igniting himself, he ran into the bar where his ex-girlfriend worked.
