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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.
I'm sorry, this whole thing sounds BS to me. While it makes sense to have the Authorities to look at and interview the victim^Hsoftware tester, putting a 72 hour mental health hold on someone is hard. You have to convince more than one person that you are serious. Most places don't want to hold people - it's a lot of paperwork, hassle and expense and there are enough genuine fruitcakes so as to leave few extra rooms at the inn. Even if he got tossed in on a hold, it would be reviewed after 24 hours.
Either San Mateo does really weird things or this was made up.
You are assuming that he was not complicit and wanted to be held for as long as possible. To me this whole thing sounds like a ploy for 15 minutes of infamy.
Unless they track them down and go all clockwork-orange on them I don't really see how the user can be "made" to do anything. They can just you know, put down the phone and shoot themselves.
In fact a coworker lost a friend this way last week. Apparently he (the victim) had been talking to his friends about it for hours on FB and then killed himself. I assume this is all actually FB trying to stave off lawsuits, but I don't see that they could do more, nor that they could afford to ignore the issue.
This is exactly why I will NEVER use Facebook.
Your phone gets nicked. Thief thinks will be funny to send you to the loony bin, posts suicidal thoughts. Before you notice your phone is even gone you are in the asylum. Will they believe you when you say you never posted? Not without interrogation, mental stability analysis, and perhaps even some psych drugs being shoved down your throat.
Same thing with terror threats, personal threats, all which could land you in JAIL because your password got compromised.
Facebook, twitter, etc. are all of the sudden acting like police and psychiatrists, and both are so prone to being hacked. Yes, I will opt out of that risk thank you!
Since Facebook doesn't verify your identity when signing up for an account.... how long before the bad guys start setting up fake accounts or hacking FB accounts and ransoming people?
Example would be: "Pay me $1000, or you will be picked up the police and put in mental institution. [insert pmt instructions]"
New tool gives the bad guys the means.
You can find any number of stories about people without any acting skills convincing those professionals that they are psychotic. Frankly, it's just a question of presenting the correct initial criteria, of which the first one will be 'being delivered by the police', and confirmation bias will take care of the rest. Seeing a lot of pathology simply doesn't help that much when symptoms are as vague and subject to interpretation as they are with mental illness.
Usually people seem to have a harder time convincing the professionals that they are, in fact, perfectly rational and not suffering from any serious mental illness. That will of course be an uphill battle against confirmation bias; they are, after all, in a psychiatric holding facility.
Who do all these people keep insisting that my actions have to have consequences
Yes indeed, and never mind the being held 72 hours. This is now in his medical records that he's suicidal. For the rest of his life he's going to be denied certain pain killers if he breaks a leg, held for additional time if he does anything that can be remotely identified as suicidal, etc. It might be bad enough he'll eventually kill himself.
The immediate effect I'd predict is more suicides, because the suicidal user who already believes they don't count because no one listens to them now has hard evidence that no one listens to what they have to say -- after all, they're just been silenced by Facebook.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?