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?

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.

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.

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...