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Facebook leaves video of man hanging baby daughter on its site for 24 hours

Jiranuch Triratana says she doesn't blame Facebook (Reuters)
Jiranuch Triratana says she doesn’t blame Facebook (Reuters)

Facebook has come under fire after videos of a Thai man hanging his 11-month-old baby were left up on the site for 24 hours.

Wuttisan Wongtalay broadcast himself killing his daughter in two clips posted using the Facebook Live streaming service before killing himself, police said on Tuesday.

People could access the videos of the child’s murder on her father’s Facebook page for roughly 24 hours, until they were taken down around 5 p.m. in Bangkok (1000 GMT) on Tuesday, or about a day after being uploaded.

The first video drew around 112,000 views by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, while 258,000 watched the second video.

The harrowing footage from Thailand showed Wongtalay tying a rope to his daughter Natalie’s neck before dropping the child, dressed in a bright pink dress, from the rooftop of a deserted building in the seaside town of Phuket.

Wuttisan’s suicide was not broadcast but his lifeless body was found beside his daughter, said Jullaus Suvannin, the police officer in charge of the case.

“He was having paranoia about his wife leaving him and not loving him,” Jullaus said.

Wuttisan’s wife, Jiranuch Triratana, said she had lived with him for over a year. At first the relationship had gone well, she said, but then he grew violent and sometimes hit her 5-year-old son from a previous husband.

She feared that something was wrong on Tuesday when she found he had left home with Natalie, whose nickname was Beta. She set out to look for them.

“I was afraid he would hurt our daughter even though he loved her,” she told Reuters news agency by phone from the funeral.

‘This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim,’ a Singapore-based Facebook spokesman said.

‘There is absolutely no place for content of this kind on Facebook and it has now been removed.’

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (AP Images)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (AP Images)

She said her husband is the only person to blame, and she bears no anger towards the social media site or the users who shared the horrific video.

“I am not angry at Facebook or blaming them on this,” Chiranut Trairat told the Associated Press. “I understand that people shared the video because they were outraged and saddened by what happened.”

Murders, suicides and sexual assault have plagued Facebook despite making up a small percentage of videos. On Tuesday a Swedish court jailed three men for the rape of a woman that was broadcast live on Facebook.

Last week, Facebook said it was reviewing how it monitored violent footage and other objectionable material after a posting of the fatal shooting of a man in Cleveland, Ohio was visible for two hours before being taken down.

The world’s largest social network has not said how long its review of internal operations might take. The California company declined to answer questions about the latest incident or make employees available for interviews.

The company relies largely on reports from its 1.9 billion users to find objectionable material. Flagged items are forwarded to thousands of Facebook workers who judge whether they should be taken down.

Facebook has said it is working on software to automatically flag videos that are objectionable. But a person who has worked on the issues at Facebook said that major Silicon Valley companies were still working on the much easier problem of blocking previously identified child pornography videos.

Identifying violence in a newly uploaded video would be very difficult, this person said.

Advertisers have not identified the violent videos as a major concern. Facebook is still a safe place for companies to build brands, said Barry Lowenthal, president of the Media Kitchen, a New York-based media buyer.

‘It’s pretty amazing that they were able to figure it out and get it down in such a short period of time with 2 billion users,’ he said.