Fake Suicide Attempt Tests Facebook Prevention Tool, Lands Man In Asylum

First time accepted submitter abhishekmdb writes Shane Tusch faked his suicide in an attempt to test the authenticity of Facebook suicide prevention tool and got detained for 72 hours. Facebook has rolled out a set of tools to keep a check on its users who are having suicidal tendencies and prevent these users from suicidal attempts. In case some user is having suicidal thoughts and mentions that in the Facebook posts and if a friend of that user reports it to Facebook then a third party will immediately review the post and Facebook would lock the suicidal user's account and the user will be made to read Facebook's suicide prevention materials.

Comments

Oh, *BRILLIANT*

[msobkow]

Take someone who is suicidal and crying out for help and to talk with their friends, and you block them from talking to anyone!

Why not just had them a gun?

Account Closed

[clam666]

And I thought there were only 43 reasons to cancel facebook. Now there are 44.

Re:Account Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more than 44 reasons.

The main reason I still have my 'account' open is diversion though, as with most of my publicly traceable actions on internet and phones - it gives anyone who might be mining/tracking/recording what I do completely misleading information (along with my fake gmail, fake public web usage, etc).

I'll admit it does making keeping in contact with family/friends a little harder though, no regular cell phone number is annoying - as is not being able to use a nice feature rich phone - but it beats being another number in the system, while actively misleading the system (if only partially, of course my spending habits are still traditional like most and I still drive a license plated car - the government can physically track me, but have little other knowledge about my activities short of physically sending someone to watch me).

He got what he deserved.

[scottbomb]

He clearly stated that he intended to take his life. I'm glad he was detained. A first repsonder is not in a position to decide if someone who just threatened suicide is telling the truth or not when they deny it. What if the cops just took him at his word and left? They'd be held liable if he really did intend to knock himself off. If he really WAS just testing FB, the proper thing to do is to alert authorities in advance. Go to the cop shop and discuss the experiment with them BEFORE you go making people legitimately freak out. But I give FB credit for having real people actually review the post instead of relying on computer text-parsing algorithms.

Re:He got what he deserved.

[Trepidity]

Glad to see that Facebook are reading Comrade Stalin's writing with such diligence.

The premise -- collectivism

[Mr.CRC]

is of course, that you do not own your existence. So if you "threaten" suicide, you may be forced to continue living.

I predict that there will be very little overall objection to this premise in the discussion that follows, as the present culture is rapidly converging toward the complete realization of the nightmare "the personal is the political" in which every aspect of everyone's life is going to be everyone else's business. With the individual a bit player.

Exist, dammit, or we'll put you in prison!

Re:The premise -- collectivism

[sjames]

Nah, some people just give a shit about people who are not themselves.

Oh, well that's okay then.

[Idarubicin]

I didn't really believe that the fire department would come when I pulled the alarm, so I ran a "test".

Who do all these people keep insisting that my actions have to have consequences?

Re:Great example

[Cito]

Well, I still have 15 to 20 fake accounts set up in facebook early days...

Time to have some fun, each have addresses all over the globe

Made originally for trolling.

Which is my point, trolls will abuse the hell out of this, its easy to roll dozens of fake accounts and report posts for suicidal ideation

Re:Great example

[Rei]

Worse, what I see as a lot more likely is people who see their friend's computer left logged into FB and want to prank them... these days they usually write some sort of embarassing post or message their friends. But if they would instead write a post talking about suicide, and then use their own accounts to alert Facebook...