mark-zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook this week from allegations that fake news on his site helped Donald Trump win but now the company is removing ad revenue from those sites. Reuters/Stephen Lam

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg briefly addressed the video of Steve Stephens and the killing of Robert Godwin at the F8 Developer Conference Tuesday.

Less than a couple of hours after the man who confessed to killing Godwin Sr., 74, was found dead in his car Tuesday in Erie, Penn., Zuckerberg took the stage at F8 to offer his condolences and said Facebook needs to do better.

“For the past decade Facebook has focused on connecting friends and family, and now with that foundation our next focus is building community. We’ve always done a lot of work to help people share and get a diversity of opinions out there and we’re always going to do this. But now, in addition, we’re also going to work on building common ground," Zuckerberg said. "Not just getting more different opinions out there but also helping to bring people closer together.

"There’s a lot to do here. We have a full roadmap, products to help build groups and community, help build a more informed society, help keep our communities safe. And we have a lot more to do here. We’re reminded of this this week by the tragedy in Cleveland. Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Robert Godwin Sr., and we have a lot of work and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” Zuckerberg said.

On Monday, Global Operations Vice President Justin Osofsky said in a community post “we know we need to do better.”

He said Facebook is reviewing the platform’s reporting flows to be sure users can report content that violates the company’s standards “as easily and quickly as possible.” The company also said it is working on its review processes.

“In this case, we did not receive a report about the first video, and we only received a report about the second video — containing the shooting — more than an hour and 45 minutes after it was posted,” Facebook said. “We received reports about the third video, containing the man’s live confession, only after it had ended.”

The company said it disabled the suspect’s account within 23 minutes of receiving the first report about the shooting video and two hours after receiving a report of any kind.

Facebook also released a timeline of the incident:

11:09AM PDT — First video, of intent to murder, uploaded. Not reported to Facebook.

11:11AM PDT — Second video, of shooting, uploaded.

11:22AM PDT — Suspect confesses to murder while using Live, is live for 5 minutes.

11:27AM PDT — Live ends, and Live video is first reported shortly after.

12:59PM PDT — Video of shooting is first reported.

1:22PM PDT — Suspect’s account disabled; all videos no longer visible to public.