On Monday, 20-year-old Wuttisan Wongtalay livestreamed himself hanging his infant daughter Beta to death. Wuttisan then turned the camera off and committed suicide, say Thai police.
"In the future, we will discuss inappropriate online content, whether on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram, and how we can speed up taking this content down," deputy national police spokesman Kissana Phatanacharoen told reporters, although he did not divulge how they intended to speed up that process.
To take Wuttisan's video down, the police had to alert Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, which in turn contacted Facebook to remove the videos. Kissana partially blamed the delay on the 14-hour time difference between Thailand and Facebook's San Francisco headquarters.
The video also was uploaded to YouTube, and across the various platforms it collected close to half a million views. Numerous commenters excoriated Facebook for their sluggish response to the horrific video uploaded onto their platform.
However, the baby's mother, Chiranut Trirat, 21, told the Associated Press that she did not blame the social media site. "I am not angry at Facebook or blaming them on this," she said. "I understand that people shared the video because they were outraged and saddened by what happened."
"This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim. There is absolutely no place for content of this kind on Facebook and it has now been removed," said a Facebook representative in a statement.
While the family may have been able to take the video down sooner, a cousin of the baby's mother said that they were too focused on finding Wuttisan and Beta to think about that.
"We will take this as a lesson and come up with a solution… but this is not something we can do immediately," Ministry of Digital Economy and Society spokesman Somsak Khaosuwan told Reuters.
While deputy police spokesman Kissana Phathanacharoen said that this was the first case of a murder being livestreamed on social media in the Land of Smiles, the Health Ministry claimed that one or two suicide videos are posted to social media every month.
In recent months, various horrors have been livestreamed on Facebook, including a gang rape in Sweden, a suicide in India and a sexual assault in Chicago. One day in February saw four murders in one day livestreamed on Facebook, including the death of a two-year-old child.
The most famous case in recent memory would be the livestreamed murder of 74-year-old Robert Godwin, Sr. by Steve Stephens in Cleveland. Two hours passed before Facebook took that video down.
