Thai woman says father, not Facebook, to blame for killing baby and broadcasting live
The video showed 20-year-old Wuttisan Wongtalay killing his baby daughter in Thailand. He then kills himself.
The wife of a Thai man who hanged their 11-month-old daughter on Facebook Live said Wednesday her husband is the only person to blame, and she bears no anger toward the social media site or the users who shared the horrific video.
The harrowing footage on Facebook Live showed 20-year-old Wuttisan Wongtalay tying a rope to his daughter’s neck before dropping the child from the rooftop of a deserted building in Phuket. He then kills himself. It was broadcast Monday evening and made inaccessible by Facebook late Tuesday afternoon.
“I am not angry at Facebook or blaming them on this,” Chiranut Trairat, 21, told The Associated Press. “I understand that people shared the video because they were outraged and saddened by what happened.”
She said her husband had been abusive in the past and spent two years in prison before they started dating.
Facebook has been seeking ways to block videos as quickly as possible after a series of gruesome images, including murder and sexual assault, were broadcast or posted.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week that his company has “a lot of work” to do on the problem.
The murder in Phuket came less than two weeks after a man in Cleveland, Ohio, posted on Facebook footage of himself shooting a man to death.
In Thailand, the potential for problems with Facebook Live became an issue last May when local media used the platform to broadcast live video of a university lecturer who was locked in a six-hour standoff with police who were seeking him in the shooting deaths of two colleagues. After negotiations for his surrender failed, he fatally shot himself, a moment that was shown live.
Facebook reaction
Facebook, 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.s