Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to make Social Media safer for our minds. No, he isn’t trying to protect us from adult images, he’s more concerned with fake news and potential damaging live video. Over the past several weeks there have been some live Facebook videos that have garnered much attention because of the graphic and horrific nature of the content. Videos of murder or suicide have been passed around social media and showed up on many of our Facebook feeds. Once these videos are filmed live, they are uploaded to the account of the person who filmed it and spread across the timelines of their followers. This often leads to more shares and potentially a viral spread of the video. The sudden popularity of these gruesome videos will then lead to thousands or even millions of people seeing them before Facebook can have them taken down. This is where the concern for public mental health comes in.
Facebook’s response to this issue is the hiring of 3,000 new employees who’s job it is to screen these live videos for any content they may deem a danger to the mental health of Facebook’s users. This team of editors is an addition to a team of nearly 4,500 people who have been screening content. The issue is that live video adds to the challenge of keeping content on Facebook free from graphic images and videos. Just responding to reports that a post may be harmful isn’t enough anymore. Facebook is trying to screen some videos and images before they’re posted. Hopefully, this will make for fewer viral videos that give us nightmares. This will also set a precedent for other social media. Including the platforms that your kids use.
What Parents Should Know
If you haven’t had a reason to talk to your kids about what they see online yet, this one should do it for you. With consistant opinions and world-views being tossed around social media, we have to have an active, ongoing conversation with our kids about what they’re seeing on their timelines. Videos are posted and shared long before any of us can see them and remove them and long before we can step in and keep our kids from seeing them. News articles are taken as fact even if they are in the “opinion” category on the news site. This is why my advice is to be a safe place for your kids to come when they see something troubling or have questions about what they’ve seen.
Whether it’s violence, bullying, or sexual content, what we see can’t be unseen. In a world where technology is changing faster than we can keep up it’s critical to be the one your kids come to when they’ve seen something that will stick with them. If the companies who develop these social media platforms are concerned enough to hire more employees to help solve the problem then those of us whose family use the service should be on top of setting up safeguards, learning more about these tech topics, and keeping the lines of communication open.
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