It will help
people report posts which will trigger a message from the site.
"Often,
friends and family who are the observers in this situation don't know what to
do," said Holly Hetherington, a Facebook strategist.
In the past
users have posted about taking their own lives, but no action was taken in
time.
This is how the
new system will work.
"The person
who flags the post will see a screen with links that allow them to message the
potentially suicidal person, contact another Facebook friend for support or
connect with a trained professional at a suicide helpline for guidance,"
University of Washington researchers explain.
Facebook then
reviews the post and if the person is thought to be in distress then
suggestions for getting help will display when they next log on.
For example
Forefront, the university organization that has been working with Facebook,
have created videos which are based on real-life accounts of coping with
thoughts of suicide.
Operations
Manager Stephen Paul Miller had a friend and college classmate who killed
himself five years ago.
He noticed a
Facebook post from his friend one evening, saying that things were too much,
that he couldn't take it anymore.
Miller resolved
to call his friend in the morning but he died that night.
"The thing
that breaks my heart the most about this is that I think it was just episodic.
I don't think he wanted to die," Miller said.
"But I was
not trained. I did not know what to do."
No comments:
Post a Comment