Esteban Felix / AP
Mark Zuckerberg's long open letter yesterday includes a beefy section on the bad stuff that happens on Facebook:
"There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more."
The Facebook founder said they're scaling up to handle it with artificial intelligence:
"Right now, we're starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization. This is technically difficult as it requires building AI that can read and understand news, but we need to work on this to help fight terrorism worldwide."
And he immediately followed that with a section on encryption and privacy, which looked different in earlier versions. But as Zuckerberg's platform deals with issues like terror recruiters and suicides and four people being murdered on Facebook Live in one day, expect to see more attempts to scale up prevention using such technologies as AI.