The app that Uvalde school shooter Salvador Ramos used before slaughtering 19 students and two teachers is bolstering its safety features — including rolling out a new “risk detection algorithm” to flag potential threats.
“The devastating events of 24 May in Uvalde, Texas, brought to light systemic issues in society that need to be addressed,” Yubo CEO Sacha Lazimi said in a statement Tuesday, ABC News reported.
“In the days since, we have been working to accelerate safety developments in our pipeline and further expand the scope of existing safeguards across our platform,” he added.
The social media platform’s reps said they have updated its risk-detection policy, improved its user-reporting capabilities and rolled out “comprehensive automatic moderation across the platform.”
The app also has developed a new “combined-signals risk detection algorithm” that will help provide context around possible risks by assessing “a combination of signals including keywords, emojis, and images,” ABC News reported.
The deranged mass shooter boasted of buying a gun and said some people “deserved to be raped” on Yubo, where users nicknamed him “school shooter”– even before the massacre.
The French social networking app has tens of millions of users.
A 17-year-old girl who met Ramos on the app told Sky News that Ramos would “threaten rape and kidnapping and murder” in chatrooms.
When he privately messaged her and other girls, she said he would threaten them if they didn’t reply.
Ramos also reportedly sent chilling messages to a 15-year-old girl in Germany shortly before he launched his attack at Robb Elementary School. The girl reportedly went by the nickname Cece on Yubo.
ABC News reported that one user told the network that she tried to report Ramos to Yubo, but that “regardless of how many times he was reported … he would still come back.”
