USA TODAY International Edition
FACEBOOK STEPS UP SUICIDE PREVENTION
Social media giant also testing AI to identify warning signs
“There always has been this concern: Will something like this cause an epidemic or rash? The answer is: We don’t know yet.” Nadine Kaslow, professor in Emory University School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences
Faced with an alarming phenomenon, people taking their own lives on its livestreaming service, Facebook is stepping up efforts to prevent suicides.
Wednesday, Facebook announced it will integrate realtime suicide prevention tools into Facebook Live. It also said it will offer live- chat support from crisis support organizations such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line through Facebook Messenger and make it easier to report suicide or self- injury.
The most novel of the new tools: Facebook is testing artificial intelligence to identify warning signs of self- harm and suicide in Facebook posts and comments.
The goal, says Facebook, is to connect people in distress with people who can help.
In January, a 14- year- old girl hung herself in her Florida foster home and a 33- year- old aspiring actor shot himself in a car on a Los Angeles street, both on Facebook Live. A young Turkish man who had broken up with his girlfriend told viewers before committing suicide on Facebook Live in October, “No one believed when I said I will kill myself. So watch this.”
Public suicide is not new, but technologies such as live streaming have helped these haunting public acts reach far more people.
Facebook, which opened up its Live feature to the public last year, has been pushing its more than 1.8 billion users to try out the feature, rolling out an adver- tising campaign and featuring live streams in users’ news feeds.
Live lets Facebook users share their lives publicly in real time. It can be a powerful tool to celebrate joyful occasions, say a wedding anniversary or a child’s first steps, and to capture traumatic, sometimes graphic, events as they unfold, such as the police shooting of Philando Castile last summer or the torture of a mentally challenged teenager in Chicago in January.
Suicide is still a rare event on Facebook Live, and numbers are hard to come by. According to Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Save. org, which advises Facebook, there have been seven known cases since live streaming became available, not all of them on Facebook. Facebook spokesman William Nevius refused to say how many people have broadcast on Facebook Live as they have taken their own lives.
However small the number of suicides on Facebook Live, the trend is troubling to Nadine Kaslow, professor in Emory Univer- sity School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
“Unfortunately we have now seen a growing series of young people and adults committing suicide and showing this on Facebook Live,” says Kaslow, the former president of the American Psychological Association. “There always has been this concern: Will something like this cause an epidemic or rash? The answer is: We don’t know yet.”
Among Internet companies, Facebook is considered a leader in suicide prevention, regularly updating tools to make it easier to report suicide or self- harm. It began developing tools 10 years ago after a wave of suicides among high school students in Palo Alto, Calif., then the Silicon Valley headquarters of the company.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to find innovative ways to prevent suicide on Facebook in a recent letter to Facebook users. “There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live streamed — that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner,” he wrote.
After consulting suicide prevention experts, Facebook decided to offer intervention tools to the person streaming the video and the person viewing it.
“Some people may say we should cut off the stream the moment there’s a hint of somebody talking about suicide, but what we learned from experts and what they emphasized to us is that cutting off the stream too early removes the chance of someone being able to provide help,” said Jennifer Guadagno, Facebook’s lead researcher for suicide prevention. “In this way, Live becomes a lifeline. It opens up the opportunity for people to reach out for support and for people to give support at this time that’s critically important.”