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May 6, 2019 10:34 am

Is Facebook's Suicide-Prevention Tool Doing Any Good?

"Facebook knew there was a problem when a string of people used the platform to publicly broadcast their suicides in real time," reports Business Insider, raising questions about what the company has done since:Facebook has a suicide-monitoring tool that uses machine learning to identify posts that may indicate someone is at risk of killing themselves. The tool was involved in sending emergency responders to locations more than 3,500 times as of last fall. A Harvard psychiatrist is worried the tool could worsen health problems by homing in on the wrong people or escalating mental-health crises... "We as the public are partaking in this grand experiment, but we don't know if it's useful or not," Harvard psychiatrist and tech consultant John Torous told Business Insider last week.... Without public information on the tool, Torous said big questions about Facebook's suicide-monitoring tool are impossible to answer... "It's one thing for an academic or a company to say this will or won't work. But you're not seeing any on-the-ground peer-reviewed evidence," Torous said. "It's concerning. It kind of has that Theranos feel...." Because of privacy issues, emergency responders can't tell Facebook what happened at the scene of a potential suicide, said Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety. In other words, emergency responders can't tell Facebook if they reached the scene too late to stop a death, showed up to the wrong place, or arrived only to learn there was no real problem. Torous, a psychiatrist who's familiar with the thorny issues in predicting suicide, is skeptical of how that will play out with regard to the suicide monitoring tool. He points to a review of 17 studies in which researchers analyzed 64 different suicide-prediction models and concluded that the models had almost no ability to successfully predict a suicide attempt. "We know Facebook built it and they're using it, but we don't really know if it's accurate, if it's flagging the right or wrong people, or if it's flagging things too early or too late," Torous said.

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