Facebook has always been a favorite outlet for many people posting about their travels, friends, night life, love life, events and so much more. Unfortunately, posts are not always about good things as an alarming trend of so-called "suicide posts" is emerging and growing in number every day. Teens, parents, young adults and even famous people now use Facebook as a way to post their final goodbyes to friends before taking their own lives.
Alarmed and realizing that it is in the position to do something about it, Facebook is launching suicide prevention tools that are cleverly engineered to actually make a difference.
It is indeed tough to create such tools especially when considering exactly how they are supposed to work. Will Facebook use an algorithm that watches out for specific words that a suicidal person might use?
Turns out the Facebook team did something better than that: it is asking for help from the Facebook community to make the suicide watch tools possible. Every time you see a friend post something alarming, you can click on a drop down menu and report the status. This will then be flagged and watched by Facebook's global community operations to better determine whether a person is suicidal or not.
Not Perfect
It might not be a perfect solution, but it's a start. Users identified to be having issues will be given further help by the social networking site's community team, possibly by providing materials that can help them through their tough time.
Other facets of the suicide prevention tools are still in question. For example: would the reported users know that their status have been flagged by specific people in their friend list?
Not The First Time
This is not the first suicide prevention efforts of Facebook, the first few being limited to English speaking countries. Today, however, the tool will encompass all Facebook users from around the globe.
Experiments on positive and negative emotions have been used before, specifically in 2014. Using Facebook's algorithm, positive posts were given more weight in users' timeline — which is why you might have noticed that posts about weddings and birthdays often pop out first. For this, one of the company's strategies was to watch out for the word "Congratulations" in the text. For the suicide prevention tools, the global social media platform evidently decided to go a bit further.
"People really want to help, but often they just don't know what to say, what to do or how to help their friends," told Vanessa Callison-Burch to The New York Times. She is a product manager at Facebook working on this particular endeavor. Facebook users will be given a certain list of resources, such as help lines, that they can access to attend to their friend who badly needs help.
"Given that Facebook is the place you're connected to friends and family, it seemed like a natural fit," said a Facebook researcher who leads the project, Dr. Jennifer Guadagno.
