Social media app Yubo announced on Tuesday that its platform would be adding a new safety feature, and it will be updating its usage guidelines following the news that the accused Robb Elementary gunman Salvador Ramos allegedly used the app to send disturbing messages that had gone unnoticed days leading to the shooting.
The platform announced that it had updated its risk-detection policy, enhanced its user-reporting capabilities, and introduced audio-moderation technology for its live streams, allowing comprehensive automatic moderation across the platform.
Sacha Lazimi, the Yubo CEO, said that the devastating events of May 24 in Uvalde raised systemic issues that need to be addressed. Since then, Lazimi added that they had been working to accelerate the safety developments and expand the scope of existing safeguards across the platform.
The platform had also developed a "combined-signals risk detection algorithm" that will help provide context around potential risks on its platform. The feature would assess a combination of signals, including keywords, emojis, and images, ABC News reports.
He kept coming back
Yubo is a social media platform that mixes live streaming and social networking.
Weeks before the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the gunman made many disturbing comments on various social media platforms. Law enforcement asked why they were not reported, but online users said they tried to do so, but their efforts were futile. He kept coming back no matter how many times he was reported. They said there were red signs in his behavior when he referenced school shootings and shared pictures and videos of guns.
According to SEA Mashable, Ramos frequently made hostile remarks on the platform. He would often post photos of dead cats and threatened girls in the app with rape and sexual assault. A Yubo user said that leaders of panels and live chats on the app would ban the gunman after he joined live groups and issued threatening comments. However, users said that the reporting function of Yubo barely works.
Users also claimed that Ramos was temporarily banned from the app but eventually got access again using the same account. They claimed that his account remained live on the platform four days before the shooting.
When ABC News asked Yubo earlier this month to confirm if Ramos' account had been flagged, their spokesperson said they could not legally release any specific user information outside of direct request from law enforcement.
Ramos' online behavior sparked questions on the capacity of social media companies to monitor their platforms for red flags of rising hate online. Yubo, however, assured that the company is fully cooperating with law enforcement on their investigation.
As per Education Week, Yubo was launched in 2015 by a French company and is also known as Tinder for teens. It has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the U.S.
Related Article: Mom Finds Out Her Daughter's Daycare Apps are "Dangerously Insecure"
