Facebook tool needs work

A suicide prevention interface tool will soon be appearing on your Facebook newsfeed, and many are wondering how effective this new feature will be at recognizing and potentially stopping a suicide attempt.

Facebook announced Feb. 25 that it would be implementing a process that would allow users to directly report their friends’ posts that may be seen as troubling.

After a user reports a post, Facebook’s safety specialist teams will review it and if deemed at risk, they will send encouraging messages from friends and tips on how to get help for the original poster to see the next time he or she logs in.

A Facebook representative told the Huffington Post that this feature is currently available to about half of the users in the United States. Facebook hopes to make it available to the rest of the country and the world in the next couple of months.

It is about time that Facebook, being the most popular social media site today with over 1.3 billion users, steps up to aid in suicide prevention. Other sites like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest already have such tools that allow users to report posts that may be seen as dangerous.

While this is a great feature to have, some are worried about how effective this new tool will really be.

Some skeptics are afraid of users misinterpreting posts or Internet trolls abusing the system to play a joke on their friends. Depressing lyrics from a user’s favorite My Chemical Romance song? Report it. Want to get revenge on a friend for not giving you his homework to copy? Find a post and report it.

However, Facebook Product Manager Rob Boyle and Facebook Community Operations Safety Specialist Nicole Staubli hope that by having actual people instead of an A.I. monitor the reported posts, there will be a decrease in false assumptions.

They made a post on the Facebook Safety page stating that they have teams around the world working 24/7 on reviewing any reported posts.

Another concern is the immediacy of the help. Facebook says it will offer help the next time a user logs in, but it cannot be certain when that will be. It could tomorrow, in a week or possibly never again.

Some are concerned that the alert system will not be useful if immediate help is not offered. Others argue that seeking help from suicide prevention hotlines right away without confirming that the post is indeed linked to a suicide attempt is senseless.

The new feature is still far from perfect, but it is a great step toward better suicide prevention and recognition.

There are still holes in the effectiveness of the tool, but we still need to give Facebook some credit for offering a way to help users look out for each other.

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Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.

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