Facebook Takes Three Hours To Remove Gruesome Murder Video

skeleton_hackerFacebook’s live video streaming platform Facebook Live has been repeatedly used to broadcast violence and other disturbing content. However, the service may have reached a crisis point this week when a man appeared to live stream a murder he committed — and Facebook took hours to remove the footage.

The site has understandably received fierce criticism for not taking down the video sooner, but it says that it did not receive a report about it for well over an hour. In an official response, Facebook said it removed the video 23 minutes after it first learned about it, though the site followed up by saying “we know we need to do better.”

However, this may only be the beginning of the ramifications Facebook could deal with after this video. According to some experts, the site may need to re-evaluate the entire platform’s purpose.

“I think it’s entirely possible that this incident could change the game,” Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson told CBS. “What I think will happen now is Facebook will have to, A) look at their algorithms to try to figure out whether this can be stopped, and B) think about the culture; there is a real culture of violence that has perpetrated itself inside of video sharing and social media platforms, and can that be changed?”

If it wasn’t obvious before, it certainly is now: Facebook needs to do more to prevent this kind of horrifying content from getting posted.