"In the spring of 2017, Rosen put a team of engineers on “lockdown,” a Facebook practice in which people drop everything to solve a problem. The problem was dire indeed: People were using Facebook Live, a video-streaming service that had just launched, to announce their intention to kill themselves, and even to stream themselves doing it." While I've got some strong feelings about Facebook and their actions... that's…
> creating a system where you realize people are sharing their suicide on. They should have planned for that pre-launch and had a plan in place to deal with users like that. When Live was launched, journalists asked Zuckerberg about this exact topic and he would not believe the Live platform would be used in that way. Of course murders and suicides were streamed on the platform and FB was yet again on the back foot.…
The other comments in this thread have discussed the "optimistic usage". Well, it's not really politically correct to say "yes, that's likely to happen, and we've implemented a bunch of fixes to deal with that", regardless of whether it had happened.
Deploying Hanlon's Razor, I'm thinking it was foreseen but not taken as seriously as it should have been.
The other possibility is that, it was foreseen, the reaction was expected, and the burning-towers-of-money-to-fix-all-the-things response is marketing at the end of the day to make the site seem responsibl{,y scalabl}e.