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In Screening for Suicide Risk, Facebook Takes on Tricky Public Health Role

75 points by mindgam3 8y ago

mindgam3 8y ago
“Facebook’s rise as a global arbiter of mental distress puts the social network in a tricky position at a time when it is under investigation for privacy lapses by regulators in the United States, Canada and the European Union — as well as facing heightened scrutiny for failing to respond quickly to election interference and ethnic hatred campaigns on its site.”
- yostrovs 8y ago
  The New York Times must be the global arbiter of who is the global arbiter of mental distress.
magicalhippo 8y ago
Reminds me of high-school when a buddy was goofing off in class, taking an online quiz which accompanied a news article about suicide and depression. The quiz asked "Are you depressed?". A few of us were following what he was doing, and at the end of the quiz he got the result effectively saying seek immediate professional help. Shocked, he exclaimed "What?! I'm having the time of my life!" Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and being madly in love... and he just got a new GF a week earlier.
- jazoom 8y ago
  > Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and being madly in love Such as? I'm having a hard time coming up with any.
  - alangpierce 8y ago
    Two that come to mind are trouble sleeping and lack of concentration, plus maybe social withdrawal (at least from most friendships). But still, seems like a stretch; most depression symptoms are pretty unambiguously negative.
    - jazoom 8y ago
      Yeah. I'm a doctor and I've never heard a similar description of symptoms from a depressed individual and an individual in love. My guess is the wording in the quiz was poor.
      - magicalhippo 8y ago
        I can't recall the details, but it were things like lack of appetite, lack of sleep, unfocused or lack of attention. I recall the that the questions made sense given the goal of the quiz, but the questions were probably too broad and, which was kinda my point, they lacked control questions to rule out other causes for those effects.
alangpierce 8y ago
> Mason Marks ... argues that Facebook’s suicide risk scoring software, along with its calls to the police that may lead to mandatory psychiatric evaluations, constitutes the practice of medicine. He says government agencies should regulate the program, requiring Facebook to produce safety and effectiveness evidence. Safety/effectiveness studies certainly seem like a good idea, though I'd be really hesitant to prohibit Facebook from doing this, at least not from worry about false positives (the privacy implications are a different issue). Facebook is just the first in a line of common-sense checks: a Facebook algorithm detects that someone seems to be suicidal, this escalates to a Facebook employee who reviews it and in extreme cases escalates to law enforcement, law enforcement gets the information from Facebook and decides how to respond, and may end up pulling in psychiatric medical help, which of course involves trained people making judgement calls. Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug.
- tbrownaw 8y ago
  Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug. Per TFA they don't actually track the outcomes of their calls because that would be too much of a privacy violation. I'd expect the resulting lack of feedback to be problematic. Also, I'd say that escalating to the people authorized to use force is a form of intervening.
- dannyr 8y ago
  Law enforcement would be forced to act if Facebook informed them. They would like to cover their asses in case something bad happens. If they didn't act, they would be susceptible to lawsuits.
  - alangpierce 8y ago
    That's fair, I guess in my ideal world, law enforcement would just act on the factual information rather than being biased by the fact that a Facebook person reported it as a concern. But as evidenced by things like swatting, police are certainly not the best at responding to reports in a calm and unbiased way. I guess my hope is that law enforcement can learn to appropriately interpret and respond to these reports (including deeming that it's actually not a concern), but maybe that's unrealistic.
protomyth 8y ago
The officer who took the call quickly located the woman, but she denied having suicidal thoughts, the police report said. Even so, the officer believed she might harm herself and told the woman that she must go to a hospital — either voluntarily or in police custody. It’s an imperfect predictor and Facebook will make a mistake which will eventually be followed by a police shooting. After all, how many stories have been published of police called for mental health issues that resulted in the shooting of the person the caller was worried about. I hope the programmers are ready to explain how it worked because I get the feeling the family’s attorney is going to have an easy time with black boxes, machine learning, and no true tracing of why.
- wtracy 8y ago
  Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services? The only legal issue I could see is violation of privacy, but I bet their EULA covers them there. Now, if they screw up bad enough, I could see it precipitating some new legislation that they might not like. Until then, I think they're in the clear. It's another one of those situations where everyone is incentivized to "do something" whether it's actually helpful or not. "Student dies after symptoms of suicidal depression went ignored" is a splashy headline. "Student unable to graduate after involuntary psychiatric detention" is not.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Google "a bias for action" and you'll see it defended as something good.
  - Trisell 8y ago
    As litigious as our society is. And having been involved in wrongful death suits in a previous line of work(firefighter/emt). When somebody is looking for money the swath of people who get sued is as long and as wide as it takes to find deep enough pockets to get some money. Facebook isn’t exactly the most trusted and liked company right now. So they are exactly the type of entity a lawyer would love to get in a court room.
  - 8y ago
yadongwen 8y ago
So should we applaud Facebooking for doing this or not?
- nradov 8y ago
  We'll applaud and curse Facebook simultaneously. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Jedi72 8y ago
Besides the obvious question of 'does it work' I see a myriad of other problems with this. Does Facebook have the internal procedures in place to prevent abuse? Will this data ultimately be used to advertise things like anti-depressants at people? I already get ads for "mindfulness apps" and other BS cures (I dont doubt the principle technique as such, but these things are pretty useless and just techies cashing in on a fad IMHO).
- chaseha 8y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but mindfulness approaches have been shown to improve depression and are an important part of CBT/DBT used by therapists everywhere
  - quantum_magpie 8y ago
    I don't want to improve depression, I want to get rid of it! :)
hnaccy 8y ago
Taking people by implicit threat of force because they've been marked by some global surveillance system is bad.
sparkie 8y ago
How long until this expands to screening for political view points so that wrongthinkers must go to a re-education camp - either voluntarily or in police custody?
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I've been hospitalized twice on a suicide watch. I've also had supposedly "well meaning" strangers call the cops on me when I was homeless to "check on me." The cops advised me I shouldn't be walking in the bike lane that everyone walked in because there was no sidewalk on that side of the road. Having advised me of this, had they stopped me again, they would have ticketed me. I then had to routinely expend extra energy to go out of my way going "home" every single day. No, the cops absolutely weren't going to help me solve any of my actual problems. No, they absolutely didn't care about me, no. Calling the cops on a stranger because you supposedly care about their welfare is asshole behavior. I don't care at all about your supposed justification or algorithms etc. If you care, you check on them yourself or maybe call an ambulance. If you don't know them well enough to do that without it going weird and shitty places, then mind your own damn business.
- nradov 8y ago
  In mostly places there's no difference between calling police or an ambulance. Everything is handled out of the same dispatch center, and the dispatcher will send whichever first responders they think are appropriate based on policy.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I didn't actually like it when strangers called an ambulance on me when I was homeless either. But the ambulance driver at least didn't threaten to ticket me if he ever saw me again in that spot. Also, the remark about ambulances wasn't in my original comment. I added it after the fact, perhaps a mistake.
  - smelendez 8y ago
    Some places they habitually send a cop and an ambulance, even if there's just a medical emergency.
  - bjt2n3904 8y ago
    Former EMT. If you called in that you had suicidal ideation and had the means to harm yourself, it would be treated like a hostage situation, where you are both the hostage and the captor--especially if you have a weapon like a knife or gun. I can see few situations where they would send only an ambulance. The closest is if you said you simply overdosed on pills. However, at this point you need to go to the hospital. The ambulance has no ability to force you if you change your mind. Police would likely be sent along to make sure you didn't change your mind.
rixrax 8y ago
Anyone else think this is Super Creepy? Not long a go I would have expected to find this article from Onion News. So now platform that arguably actively participates in making people depressed has launched an human assisted AI to report people to authorities. How Orwellian is that.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  No, I do not think that a company reporting suicide attempts or messages that appear to indicate an immediate desire for suicide is creepy. This is not just a thing Facebook does, either. This is not "Orwellian". And the keyword in the claim about Facebook making people depressed is "arguable".
bjt2n3904 8y ago
This. Isn't. Facebook's. Job. No, seriously. Facebook should host content and serve ads. That's it. They don't need to worry about being the arbiter of truthful news. They don't need to stop "hate". They don't need to make calls about who needs a psych eval. They just need to host content. But if they truly want to do this, what happens when someone sues them for not making the call? I made the new year's resolution to delete my account yesterday. I almost chickened out, but then this article comes up.
- dannyr 8y ago
  Facebook does not just host content. I would agree with you that Facebook should not be an arbiter of truthful news or stop hate. But they are indeed an arbiter. They continue to push content to users to keep them consuming their product. They promote content that makes people engaged and that usually means content that makes people angry. If they stop inserting posts from sources users don't follow and not rank stories from friends, I would agree with you.
  - austincheney 8y ago
    They also host advertising. I wonder how much advertisers would be willing to pay for suicide risk flags.
- RA_Fisher 8y ago
  With great power comes great duty.
- pcurve 8y ago
  I hear you... But what if they have a reasonably accurate model that tested well (say 75%). Once day, their researchers decide to test how accurate the model is by setting real time flags, but take no action. And let's say, it turns out, of 100 people, 75 people did end up taking their life. What would you propose they do?
  - lobotryas 8y ago
    Nothing, because Facebook should not be in the business of making these decisions. For sone folks, like me and the GO, there are no “buts” about it.
sn41 8y ago
Oh. my. Please do not play with people's lives based on an algorithm whose classification output we have no way of explaining.
Kaveren 8y ago
It seems like there's a vendetta against Facebook here. The term "mixed results" is used why? Everything they're doing is completely voluntary. NYT somehow managed to paint Facebook alerting the police about a possible suicide attempt as something negative, just because the police already helped the person. Or about them being too late to report it, again, this isn't Facebook's fault. You can argue on the term "mixed result", but I think it's reasonable to assume they're indicating that non-success is a negative result, even when Facebook is going entirely above and beyond here to begin with, so there really isn't any "negative result" to be had. Do people dislike big tech companies so much that reporting immediately concerning messages and suicide attempts to the police must be a bad thing? This is common practice anyway. If you write that you're about to kill yourself on Reddit and a moderator notices it, I sure hope the police are contacted. Nothing I see to criticize here at all.
shiado 8y ago
The political power afforded to those who get to make calls about the psychological state of individuals is almost endless. I fully expect social media giants to use their data to classify the mental state of their users for political and social ends. For an idea of the potential for abuse read here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
ec109685 8y ago
“Earlier that day, a local woman wrote a Facebook post saying she was walking home and intended to kill herself when she got there, according to a police report on the case. Facebook called to warn the Police Department about the suicide threat.” Amazing this is considered bad by the commenters here.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal? You don't see how something like that could be wildly misinterpreted in written form, without context, without voice tone, etc? It's easy to feel like what you say online doesn't really count. People feel that way all the time and that fact often causes problems. Usually, though, those problems don't involve someone calling the cops on you "for your own good." At most, you get banned from some forum.
  - smnrchrds 8y ago
    > So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal Indeed. Imagine if Facebook called CPS/police every time a user wrote "my dad/mom/partner/boss is gonna kill me when he/she finds out."
  - ec109685 8y ago
    > without context They do have context given how much of a person’s internet life they can “see”. While you can argue that is bad, if they have enough signal a person is likely to do harm and the person says something like that, it seems like it’s a net positive for Facebook to alert someone to help the person out.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I do a helluva lot of commenting online via twitter, various forums and a bunch of blogs. Over the years, I've gotten much more careful about the things I say online on specific topics because people routinely imagine they know me better than they do based on having read my writing for so many years. So my experience really doesn't fit with what you are saying at all. My experience is that what people say online is the tip of the iceberg of their life and the world imagines it has greater context than it really has and leaps to weird and inaccurate conclusions on a pretty regular basis. Trying to figure out how to express myself so I feel like I'm actually understood takes an inordinate amount of my time. I have reason to believe most other people don't spend anywhere near as much time and effort as I do on trying to sort that out. Most of the time, most people don't seem to get as wildly and horrifically misunderstood as I seem to so often end up being. Or if they are misunderstood, it isn't that big of a deal in many cases. But I remain aghast at the idea of someone calling the cops on me because of something I have said online that people imagine they understood that was not a "threat" against anyone but me. On top of being skeptical that Facebook understands you as well as you imagine they do, I am also pro right to die. In a nutshell, if people give a damn about my sorry ass, they could choose to do something meaningful in the here and now to help me make my life work instead of being part of the problem, making my life harder than it already is and then pretending to themselves they are Good People by calling the god-damned cops on me for leaving a fucking courtesy note somewhere online if I decide to finally check the fuck out of here. Note to self: Don't bother to leave a courtesy note online informing anyone of fuck all. They really don't deserve such courtesies. Geez.
LORD_GARTH 8y ago
so, when facebook decides you are mentally ill or suicidal, they call the cops for a welfare check, based on generated data ? so who thinks that algorithmically generated data should be considered reasonable suspicion, thus trumping 4th amendment, at least?
perfmode 8y ago
As a black man in America, I really don’t want Facebook sending police to my home for any reason whatsoever.
- emanreus 8y ago
  Perhaps you feel a bit depressed sir? Don't worry, help is on its way http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg
cemregr 8y ago
Is the ask here for Facebook not to do anything to intervene? Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized suicides, so doesn’t quite compute that their attempt to do something about it is also bad.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  Times just likes to bash their competition, Facebook, at every opportunity. They're not attempting to hide their agenda.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized suicides, so doesn’t quite compute that their attempt to do something about it is also bad. If Facebook's algorithms were promoting suicide-related posts, then doing something about it might be good, but it does not follow that they should also take an active role in suicide prevention. You are creating a false dichotomy, both things can be bad at the same time. E.g.: being a thief is bad, being a vigilante is also bad.
rdxm 8y ago
Just when you think we've hit peak FB douchebaggery (Portal), they up their game and prove yet again what a disaster they are as an entity. Seriously, they are a cancer on social interaction not an enhancement to it.
wtmt 8y ago
Facebook the company and platform need to be broken up and the pieces/parts isolated from each other. For all the benefits that people see in using it, Facebook has become the most dangerous online company in the world.
- antpls 8y ago
  As far as I remember, for every features of Facebook, like private messages, sharing pictures and status, etc, there is at least one alternative, and people are free to move to several competitors. There is no technical reason to force the Facebook company to change their products, but they might have an obligation to educate people about the usages of its website. You need strong proof to claim "Facebook has become the most dangerous online company". Recently, Facebook groups were used to organize the yellow vests movement in France. For non-techies, Facebook does provide a new way to communicate. You could always argue "oh yeah, but it already existed 15 years ago with X", but Facebook made it available to the masses. The security/social concerns happening recently create new opportunities for Facebook's competition, so I wouldn't be that alarmed. Google, on the other hand...
bbllbves 8y ago
In many cases, Facebook does more harm than good. “oh so you were trying to reconnect with Purple, huh? You’re about to get a call from Spencer“ Facebook had Mickey Mouse security for a very long time. At least google went out of their way to design their data security properly
brudgers 8y ago
This story illustrates why New York Times has fixated on aggressive negative coverage of Facebook. Suicide prevention is another area where Facebook is wiping the floor with newspapers. As an information channel, newspapers can't compete in over most of the landscape. The article includes the head of a premier suicide prevention program, John Draper, praising Facebook's initiative. Data collection may be bad, but suicide prevention is a beneficial byproduct. Data collection may be bad, but the New York Times won't be accused of leading by example. The article is packaged to ping Google, Amazon, and yes Facebook among it's 32 scripts. It's unlikely any of this there to serve a higher common interest than suicide prevention. The examples in the coverage show how far Facebook outclasses the New York Times. Facebook said its suicide risk scoring system worked worldwide in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic Facebook is working on something relevant to suicide prevention in Mozambique, Algeria, Dominican Republic, and Australia. Beyond it's role in US public policy, the New York Times will always be approximately irrelevant to people in these places. It's reporting is parochial. Interviewing two experts in New York, four police forces on the east coast and Ohio. To me as a non-absolutist, judgment about the initiative's tradeoffs ought to consider stories from Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Canada. Those people don't enter the parochial conversation at the New York Times. Preventing suicides is the kind of difference journalism is supposed to make in people's lives. The New York Times is driven of "weapons of mass destruction" reporting on Facebook's suicide prevention initiative because it is so completely outclassed as an instrument for journalistic impact on the lives of individuals.
smarttack 8y ago
"You haven't logged onto Facebook in over a month. We were concerned so we sent over an over an officer for a welfare check"
50656E6973 8y ago
This seems ironic, coming from a platform which profits from emotional contagions and degrades mental health.

75 points by mindgam3 8y ago

“Facebook’s rise as a global arbiter of mental distress puts the social network in a tricky position at a time when it is under investigation for privacy lapses by regulators in the United States, Canada and the European Union — as well as facing heightened scrutiny for failing to respond quickly to election interference and ethnic hatred campaigns on its site.”

yostrovs 8y ago
The New York Times must be the global arbiter of who is the global arbiter of mental distress.

magicalhippo 8y ago

Reminds me of high-school when a buddy was goofing off in class, taking an online quiz which accompanied a news article about suicide and depression. The quiz asked "Are you depressed?". A few of us were following what he was doing, and at the end of the quiz he got the result effectively saying seek immediate professional help. Shocked, he exclaimed "What?! I'm having the time of my life!" Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and being madly in love... and he just got a new GF a week earlier.

jazoom 8y ago
> Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and being madly in love Such as? I'm having a hard time coming up with any.
- alangpierce 8y ago
  Two that come to mind are trouble sleeping and lack of concentration, plus maybe social withdrawal (at least from most friendships). But still, seems like a stretch; most depression symptoms are pretty unambiguously negative.
  - jazoom 8y ago
    Yeah. I'm a doctor and I've never heard a similar description of symptoms from a depressed individual and an individual in love. My guess is the wording in the quiz was poor.
    - magicalhippo 8y ago
      I can't recall the details, but it were things like lack of appetite, lack of sleep, unfocused or lack of attention. I recall the that the questions made sense given the goal of the quiz, but the questions were probably too broad and, which was kinda my point, they lacked control questions to rule out other causes for those effects.

alangpierce 8y ago

> Mason Marks ... argues that Facebook’s suicide risk scoring software, along with its calls to the police that may lead to mandatory psychiatric evaluations, constitutes the practice of medicine. He says government agencies should regulate the program, requiring Facebook to produce safety and effectiveness evidence. Safety/effectiveness studies certainly seem like a good idea, though I'd be really hesitant to prohibit Facebook from doing this, at least not from worry about false positives (the privacy implications are a different issue). Facebook is just the first in a line of common-sense checks: a Facebook algorithm detects that someone seems to be suicidal, this escalates to a Facebook employee who reviews it and in extreme cases escalates to law enforcement, law enforcement gets the information from Facebook and decides how to respond, and may end up pulling in psychiatric medical help, which of course involves trained people making judgement calls. Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug.

tbrownaw 8y ago
Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug. Per TFA they don't actually track the outcomes of their calls because that would be too much of a privacy violation. I'd expect the resulting lack of feedback to be problematic. Also, I'd say that escalating to the people authorized to use force is a form of intervening.
dannyr 8y ago
Law enforcement would be forced to act if Facebook informed them. They would like to cover their asses in case something bad happens. If they didn't act, they would be susceptible to lawsuits.
- alangpierce 8y ago
  That's fair, I guess in my ideal world, law enforcement would just act on the factual information rather than being biased by the fact that a Facebook person reported it as a concern. But as evidenced by things like swatting, police are certainly not the best at responding to reports in a calm and unbiased way. I guess my hope is that law enforcement can learn to appropriately interpret and respond to these reports (including deeming that it's actually not a concern), but maybe that's unrealistic.

protomyth 8y ago

The officer who took the call quickly located the woman, but she denied having suicidal thoughts, the police report said. Even so, the officer believed she might harm herself and told the woman that she must go to a hospital — either voluntarily or in police custody. It’s an imperfect predictor and Facebook will make a mistake which will eventually be followed by a police shooting. After all, how many stories have been published of police called for mental health issues that resulted in the shooting of the person the caller was worried about. I hope the programmers are ready to explain how it worked because I get the feeling the family’s attorney is going to have an easy time with black boxes, machine learning, and no true tracing of why.

wtracy 8y ago
Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services? The only legal issue I could see is violation of privacy, but I bet their EULA covers them there. Now, if they screw up bad enough, I could see it precipitating some new legislation that they might not like. Until then, I think they're in the clear. It's another one of those situations where everyone is incentivized to "do something" whether it's actually helpful or not. "Student dies after symptoms of suicidal depression went ignored" is a splashy headline. "Student unable to graduate after involuntary psychiatric detention" is not.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Google "a bias for action" and you'll see it defended as something good.
- Trisell 8y ago
  As litigious as our society is. And having been involved in wrongful death suits in a previous line of work(firefighter/emt). When somebody is looking for money the swath of people who get sued is as long and as wide as it takes to find deep enough pockets to get some money. Facebook isn’t exactly the most trusted and liked company right now. So they are exactly the type of entity a lawyer would love to get in a court room.
- 8y ago

yadongwen 8y ago

So should we applaud Facebooking for doing this or not?

nradov 8y ago
We'll applaud and curse Facebook simultaneously. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Jedi72 8y ago

Besides the obvious question of 'does it work' I see a myriad of other problems with this. Does Facebook have the internal procedures in place to prevent abuse? Will this data ultimately be used to advertise things like anti-depressants at people? I already get ads for "mindfulness apps" and other BS cures (I dont doubt the principle technique as such, but these things are pretty useless and just techies cashing in on a fad IMHO).

chaseha 8y ago
Slightly off-topic, but mindfulness approaches have been shown to improve depression and are an important part of CBT/DBT used by therapists everywhere
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  I don't want to improve depression, I want to get rid of it! :)

hnaccy 8y ago

Taking people by implicit threat of force because they've been marked by some global surveillance system is bad.

sparkie 8y ago

How long until this expands to screening for political view points so that wrongthinkers must go to a re-education camp - either voluntarily or in police custody?

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I've been hospitalized twice on a suicide watch. I've also had supposedly "well meaning" strangers call the cops on me when I was homeless to "check on me." The cops advised me I shouldn't be walking in the bike lane that everyone walked in because there was no sidewalk on that side of the road. Having advised me of this, had they stopped me again, they would have ticketed me. I then had to routinely expend extra energy to go out of my way going "home" every single day. No, the cops absolutely weren't going to help me solve any of my actual problems. No, they absolutely didn't care about me, no. Calling the cops on a stranger because you supposedly care about their welfare is asshole behavior. I don't care at all about your supposed justification or algorithms etc. If you care, you check on them yourself or maybe call an ambulance. If you don't know them well enough to do that without it going weird and shitty places, then mind your own damn business.

nradov 8y ago
In mostly places there's no difference between calling police or an ambulance. Everything is handled out of the same dispatch center, and the dispatcher will send whichever first responders they think are appropriate based on policy.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I didn't actually like it when strangers called an ambulance on me when I was homeless either. But the ambulance driver at least didn't threaten to ticket me if he ever saw me again in that spot. Also, the remark about ambulances wasn't in my original comment. I added it after the fact, perhaps a mistake.
- smelendez 8y ago
  Some places they habitually send a cop and an ambulance, even if there's just a medical emergency.
- bjt2n3904 8y ago
  Former EMT. If you called in that you had suicidal ideation and had the means to harm yourself, it would be treated like a hostage situation, where you are both the hostage and the captor--especially if you have a weapon like a knife or gun. I can see few situations where they would send only an ambulance. The closest is if you said you simply overdosed on pills. However, at this point you need to go to the hospital. The ambulance has no ability to force you if you change your mind. Police would likely be sent along to make sure you didn't change your mind.

rixrax 8y ago

Anyone else think this is Super Creepy? Not long a go I would have expected to find this article from Onion News. So now platform that arguably actively participates in making people depressed has launched an human assisted AI to report people to authorities. How Orwellian is that.

Kaveren 8y ago
No, I do not think that a company reporting suicide attempts or messages that appear to indicate an immediate desire for suicide is creepy. This is not just a thing Facebook does, either. This is not "Orwellian". And the keyword in the claim about Facebook making people depressed is "arguable".

bjt2n3904 8y ago

This. Isn't. Facebook's. Job. No, seriously. Facebook should host content and serve ads. That's it. They don't need to worry about being the arbiter of truthful news. They don't need to stop "hate". They don't need to make calls about who needs a psych eval. They just need to host content. But if they truly want to do this, what happens when someone sues them for not making the call? I made the new year's resolution to delete my account yesterday. I almost chickened out, but then this article comes up.

dannyr 8y ago
Facebook does not just host content. I would agree with you that Facebook should not be an arbiter of truthful news or stop hate. But they are indeed an arbiter. They continue to push content to users to keep them consuming their product. They promote content that makes people engaged and that usually means content that makes people angry. If they stop inserting posts from sources users don't follow and not rank stories from friends, I would agree with you.
- austincheney 8y ago
  They also host advertising. I wonder how much advertisers would be willing to pay for suicide risk flags.
RA_Fisher 8y ago
With great power comes great duty.
pcurve 8y ago
I hear you... But what if they have a reasonably accurate model that tested well (say 75%). Once day, their researchers decide to test how accurate the model is by setting real time flags, but take no action. And let's say, it turns out, of 100 people, 75 people did end up taking their life. What would you propose they do?
- lobotryas 8y ago
  Nothing, because Facebook should not be in the business of making these decisions. For sone folks, like me and the GO, there are no “buts” about it.

sn41 8y ago

Oh. my. Please do not play with people's lives based on an algorithm whose classification output we have no way of explaining.

Kaveren 8y ago

It seems like there's a vendetta against Facebook here. The term "mixed results" is used why? Everything they're doing is completely voluntary. NYT somehow managed to paint Facebook alerting the police about a possible suicide attempt as something negative, just because the police already helped the person. Or about them being too late to report it, again, this isn't Facebook's fault. You can argue on the term "mixed result", but I think it's reasonable to assume they're indicating that non-success is a negative result, even when Facebook is going entirely above and beyond here to begin with, so there really isn't any "negative result" to be had. Do people dislike big tech companies so much that reporting immediately concerning messages and suicide attempts to the police must be a bad thing? This is common practice anyway. If you write that you're about to kill yourself on Reddit and a moderator notices it, I sure hope the police are contacted. Nothing I see to criticize here at all.

shiado 8y ago

The political power afforded to those who get to make calls about the psychological state of individuals is almost endless. I fully expect social media giants to use their data to classify the mental state of their users for political and social ends. For an idea of the potential for abuse read here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

ec109685 8y ago

“Earlier that day, a local woman wrote a Facebook post saying she was walking home and intended to kill herself when she got there, according to a police report on the case. Facebook called to warn the Police Department about the suicide threat.” Amazing this is considered bad by the commenters here.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal? You don't see how something like that could be wildly misinterpreted in written form, without context, without voice tone, etc? It's easy to feel like what you say online doesn't really count. People feel that way all the time and that fact often causes problems. Usually, though, those problems don't involve someone calling the cops on you "for your own good." At most, you get banned from some forum.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  > So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal Indeed. Imagine if Facebook called CPS/police every time a user wrote "my dad/mom/partner/boss is gonna kill me when he/she finds out."
- ec109685 8y ago
  > without context They do have context given how much of a person’s internet life they can “see”. While you can argue that is bad, if they have enough signal a person is likely to do harm and the person says something like that, it seems like it’s a net positive for Facebook to alert someone to help the person out.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I do a helluva lot of commenting online via twitter, various forums and a bunch of blogs. Over the years, I've gotten much more careful about the things I say online on specific topics because people routinely imagine they know me better than they do based on having read my writing for so many years. So my experience really doesn't fit with what you are saying at all. My experience is that what people say online is the tip of the iceberg of their life and the world imagines it has greater context than it really has and leaps to weird and inaccurate conclusions on a pretty regular basis. Trying to figure out how to express myself so I feel like I'm actually understood takes an inordinate amount of my time. I have reason to believe most other people don't spend anywhere near as much time and effort as I do on trying to sort that out. Most of the time, most people don't seem to get as wildly and horrifically misunderstood as I seem to so often end up being. Or if they are misunderstood, it isn't that big of a deal in many cases. But I remain aghast at the idea of someone calling the cops on me because of something I have said online that people imagine they understood that was not a "threat" against anyone but me. On top of being skeptical that Facebook understands you as well as you imagine they do, I am also pro right to die. In a nutshell, if people give a damn about my sorry ass, they could choose to do something meaningful in the here and now to help me make my life work instead of being part of the problem, making my life harder than it already is and then pretending to themselves they are Good People by calling the god-damned cops on me for leaving a fucking courtesy note somewhere online if I decide to finally check the fuck out of here. Note to self: Don't bother to leave a courtesy note online informing anyone of fuck all. They really don't deserve such courtesies. Geez.

LORD_GARTH 8y ago

so, when facebook decides you are mentally ill or suicidal, they call the cops for a welfare check, based on generated data ? so who thinks that algorithmically generated data should be considered reasonable suspicion, thus trumping 4th amendment, at least?

perfmode 8y ago

As a black man in America, I really don’t want Facebook sending police to my home for any reason whatsoever.

emanreus 8y ago
Perhaps you feel a bit depressed sir? Don't worry, help is on its way http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg

cemregr 8y ago

Is the ask here for Facebook not to do anything to intervene? Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized suicides, so doesn’t quite compute that their attempt to do something about it is also bad.

umeshunni 8y ago
Times just likes to bash their competition, Facebook, at every opportunity. They're not attempting to hide their agenda.
TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized suicides, so doesn’t quite compute that their attempt to do something about it is also bad. If Facebook's algorithms were promoting suicide-related posts, then doing something about it might be good, but it does not follow that they should also take an active role in suicide prevention. You are creating a false dichotomy, both things can be bad at the same time. E.g.: being a thief is bad, being a vigilante is also bad.

rdxm 8y ago

Just when you think we've hit peak FB douchebaggery (Portal), they up their game and prove yet again what a disaster they are as an entity. Seriously, they are a cancer on social interaction not an enhancement to it.

wtmt 8y ago

Facebook the company and platform need to be broken up and the pieces/parts isolated from each other. For all the benefits that people see in using it, Facebook has become the most dangerous online company in the world.

antpls 8y ago
As far as I remember, for every features of Facebook, like private messages, sharing pictures and status, etc, there is at least one alternative, and people are free to move to several competitors. There is no technical reason to force the Facebook company to change their products, but they might have an obligation to educate people about the usages of its website. You need strong proof to claim "Facebook has become the most dangerous online company". Recently, Facebook groups were used to organize the yellow vests movement in France. For non-techies, Facebook does provide a new way to communicate. You could always argue "oh yeah, but it already existed 15 years ago with X", but Facebook made it available to the masses. The security/social concerns happening recently create new opportunities for Facebook's competition, so I wouldn't be that alarmed. Google, on the other hand...

bbllbves 8y ago

In many cases, Facebook does more harm than good. “oh so you were trying to reconnect with Purple, huh? You’re about to get a call from Spencer“ Facebook had Mickey Mouse security for a very long time. At least google went out of their way to design their data security properly

brudgers 8y ago

This story illustrates why New York Times has fixated on aggressive negative coverage of Facebook. Suicide prevention is another area where Facebook is wiping the floor with newspapers. As an information channel, newspapers can't compete in over most of the landscape. The article includes the head of a premier suicide prevention program, John Draper, praising Facebook's initiative. Data collection may be bad, but suicide prevention is a beneficial byproduct. Data collection may be bad, but the New York Times won't be accused of leading by example. The article is packaged to ping Google, Amazon, and yes Facebook among it's 32 scripts. It's unlikely any of this there to serve a higher common interest than suicide prevention. The examples in the coverage show how far Facebook outclasses the New York Times. Facebook said its suicide risk scoring system worked worldwide in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic Facebook is working on something relevant to suicide prevention in Mozambique, Algeria, Dominican Republic, and Australia. Beyond it's role in US public policy, the New York Times will always be approximately irrelevant to people in these places. It's reporting is parochial. Interviewing two experts in New York, four police forces on the east coast and Ohio. To me as a non-absolutist, judgment about the initiative's tradeoffs ought to consider stories from Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Canada. Those people don't enter the parochial conversation at the New York Times. Preventing suicides is the kind of difference journalism is supposed to make in people's lives. The New York Times is driven of "weapons of mass destruction" reporting on Facebook's suicide prevention initiative because it is so completely outclassed as an instrument for journalistic impact on the lives of individuals.

smarttack 8y ago

"You haven't logged onto Facebook in over a month. We were concerned so we sent over an over an officer for a welfare check"

50656E6973 8y ago

This seems ironic, coming from a platform which profits from emotional contagions and degrades mental health.