Will Facebook Live Shut Down? Man Kills Baby In Facebook Video In Thailand
Just a week after an American man Steve Stephens murdered a 74-year-old man in Cleveland on Facebook Live, another man of Thai origin, named Wuttisan Wongtalay, killed his 11-month-old daughter in a live video on Facebook. Soon after killing the infant, he committed suicide, police said Tuesday. Viewers could access the horrific video on Wongtalay's Facebook page for about 24 hours before it was removed from the website, reports said.
"This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim," a Singapore-based Facebook spokesman said in an email to Reuters. "There is absolutely no place for content of this kind on Facebook and it has now been removed."
Read: Murder Of Robert Godwin Sr. Broadcast On Facebook Live, Police Says
According to Wongtalay's wife, Jiranuch Triratana, who lived with him for over a year, their relationship was going smooth initially but later he became violent and also hit her 5-year-old son from her ex-husband. On Tuesday, when she found he had left home with their 11-month-old daughter, she feared something was wrong and immediately started searching for them, reports said.
The incident comes amid the controversy surrounding Facebook's ability to monitor violence on its platform. The latest Cleveland murder streamed live on Facebook prompted CEO Mark Zuckerberg to address the issue at the company's annual conference for software developers. He said: "We have a lot of work and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening."
Facebook has pledged to improve how users can flag violent content. It also prohibits content that promotes violence, only permitting violent content that is considered to be in the public interest.
However, the Cleveland murder video was a shocking reminder that Facebook does not yet possess the technology that will automatically detect content featuring this kind of violence; it says it's working on it. The company, rather, relies on its users to flag these posts before they're viewed. The time difference between posting and detection of such videos has made Facebook a vulnerable tool.
In an interview with USA Today earlier this month at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters, Zuckerberg said his company has a responsibility "to continue to get better at making sure we are not a tool for spreading" video of violent acts. "If it happens in Live or if it happens in comments, it's the same," Zuckerberg said. He added: "If someone's getting hurt, you want to be able to identify what's going to happen and help the right people intervene sooner, and I view that as our responsibility."
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