Have you realized that Facebook is having a new feature, to help those people who have suicidal thoughts away from the actual action. Facebook announced in a blog post that they are having a collaboration with many mental health institutions such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and suicide intervention agencies (Now Matters Now). Facebook hope to seek appropriate ways to intervene the suicide through the social networks.
How it works?
If the user made a post on Facebook that contains self-mutilation or suicide contents, Facebook will receive the information and encourage users to communicate with mental health professionals at national suicide prevention hot line. The professions can provide advice and support to help them face and solve their problems.
In addition, Facebook also gave users who find out such posts a solution: Users can report post with suicidal thought to Facebook, the team in charge of this program will offer help to those authors who have severely suicidal posts (such as self-mutilation). Facebook said that they are committed to this function in the global promotion.
What do you think about this function? Helpful or creepy monitoring user’s activities? Will it really help people who think about suicide or push them act even quicker to suicide without leaving any trace behind? Are people post these kind of content are people who really want to suicide or just a group of people lack of attention? Will it become a useless chicken rib that only increase people playing plunks to test this function? We need time to see how it goes.
References
Facebook website.
Admittedly, this function may indeed help some people out by encouraging people who did post something on Facebook to go to see professionals who can help. However, From my perspective, the majority of the people who want to commit suicide successfully would not publicly announce that they want to kill themselves. Therefore, I don’t think this function is that helpful but at least Facebook tries its best.
I believe this kind of function should be encouraged and supported. These days, people get stressed with overloaded work or relationship problems and people who commit suicides are mostly suffered from depression. With helpful therapy and positive posts on Facebook, people can be less likely to do extreme things. Additionally, Facebook can block harmful contents and comments in advance below people’s pictures and posts on homepages will prevent more people from getting mocked at and getting depressed. Indeed, I am looking forward to new functions for people to be protected with their privacy.
What Facebook is doing is meaningful and responsible. Even though l am not sure if it is useful. I don’t know if people like to post something before they commit suicide. However, if there is a pattern to find, it would been a very nice thing. l hope people do take this thing seriously. Some naughty people might post it for fun which is not fun at all. There might be a human being error involve. You might misunderstand your friends’ post. Overall, this is really a great feature. If some body could talk to them, it would be a helpful and that might prevent tragedy from happening. Especially receive help from experts.
I like that Facebook is trying to take another step in the right direction to ensure the safety of it’s users. I’ve personally seen people post these kinds of things and let me just say it’s a very scary experience. Suicide can be stopped and prevented if there’s just someone to just talk to, and I like the aspect that Facebook is recognizing these situations and ask if they need someone to talk to. This should’ve been a thing years ago because kids that aren’t even 16 yet are on social media like Facebook and get cyber bullied on a consistent basis, and they don’t want to tell their parents or their friends because then they might seem weak to them, and then the horrible acts are acted upon their thoughts and it wasn’t prevented, and now Facebook can see if you’re having those thoughts and are looking out for you. All and all I think it’s a good idea in general to try and help those in need that don’t want to out reach for help themselves.
I think that it is a very responsible step that Facebook is taking with the new function. It also makes Facebook appear to be that much more of a personable interaction. Suicidal situations can be avoided if one person shows some interest without any judgement. However, I also think that there is a flip side to this. I think that immature people will see this a function that they can use for a laugh like poking someone on Facebook. That’s not good because this is a very serious matter that Facebook is getting involved in.