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Three weeks ago, Josh Steen watched his close friend Ronnie McNutt kill himself live on Facebook.
Now, he is fighting for answers from the firm and other social media platforms where clips of the suicide are widely available.
"For the last two and a half weeks Ronnie's image has been one of the most recognisable on the internet and yet these companies claim to have detection software to stop it, so something isn't right," he said.
He reported it to Facebook during the livestream, at 22:00 Mississippi time - two hours after the video had started, and half an hour before Ronnie killed himself.
Mr McNutt was a 33-year-old army veteran who had seen active service in Iraq, and subsequently dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health issues.
He had recently broken up with his girlfriend and had been drinking on the night of his death.
He was talking about suicide and arguing with people who were trying to comfort him.
At some point the police turned up outside his apartment.
He is aware that many will argue Mr McNutt should never have filmed his death in this manner and that others will blame him for the psychological damage inflicted on those seeing the video.
McNutt’s friend and podcast co-host Josh Steen told TechCrunch that the stream had been flagged long before he killed himself. “I firmly believe, because I knew him and how these interactions worked, had the stream ended it would’ve diverted his attention enough for SOME kind of intervention,” Steen wrote in an email.
“It’s pure speculation, but I think if they’d have cut his stream off he wouldn’t have ended his life.”
The video of Ronnie McNutt’s suicide originated on August 31, and took nearly three hours to take down in the first place, by which time it had been seen and downloaded by innumerable people.
