A video of a Mississippi Army veteran taking his own life has gone viral on TikTok, exposing viewers as young as 13 to the graphic footage. The company is now working around the clock to stop the video from spreading any further and ban users who have uploaded it. However, the content is still finding his way around the app.
The incident was initially shown on Facebook Live on August 31, when Ronnie McNutt, 33, tragically ended his life. Viewers were able to spread footage of the video shortly after because Facebook refused to remove it, due to it not violating the company’s Community Standards.
Josh Steen, a friend of McNutt, said that the army vet, who served in Iraq and suffered from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), was recently dealing with relationship problems.
He also revealed that on the night of the incident, he was contacted by someone who told him that McNutt had started a live stream and had accidentally fired a gun.
Steen then went to Live and saw that his friend was intoxicated and rambling. He immediately flagged the live stream to Facebook while McNutt was still alive, but he received no reply. He then contacted the police, who stood outside of McNutt’s apartment and watched him on Facebook.
At 10:30 p.m., McNutt took his own life. However, it wasn’t until an hour and twenty-one minutes later that his friend got a response from Facebook, who stated that they would not remove the video because it did not breach the company’s Community Standards, according to a screenshot Steen shared with Heavy.
In a statement to VICE, Facebook stated that the video was taken down not long after it was posted but declined to comment on why they initially said the footage did not violate its Community Standards. However, according to Steen, the video wasn’t taken down until after 1 a.m., which was more than two hours after McNutt took his life. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
By then, the damage was done, and the video had surfaced to other platforms.
In fact, since then, Facebook users have even taken to McNutt’s page to share links of his suicide clip or photos of his death. Although Steen and his friends have made several attempts to flag the posts to have them taken down, they’ve had no success.
“Somehow those don’t seem to qualify as going against Facebook Standards,” Steen told Heavy. “Mainly, it seems, because Ronnie is already dead.”
Now, as the video continues to go viral on other mainstream apps, including TikTok, The social network is working overtime to cease the spread.
“We are banning accounts that repeatedly try to upload clips, and we appreciate our community members who’ve reported content and warned others against watching, engaging or sharing such videos on any platform out of respect for the person and their family,” TikTok told VICE News.
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