You're assuming it will be anywhere close to accurate. Knowing Facebook's previous attempts at AI, I wouldn't expect much. I wonder what the false positive rate will be.
"Dave, you should stop thinking about killing yourself!"
- "But...I wasn't thinking about killing myself?!"
"Come on, Dave, deep down you know you want to. You can't fool me! I know everything about you."
"- Well, now that I think about it, watching Facebook all day does make me feel quite depressed..."
The content of "places" feature looks like it's managed by a machine learning algorithm, and it appears to be a disaster (from a user perspective). It incorrectly merges and proposes bizarre categories all the time.
There was an bad issue with a place I cared enough about to try to correct, so I ventured into the "community" they setup to build their training set to try to get it fixed. It was such a depressing place. Hundreds of people tricked by gamification into working for free for a for-profit company, only to be frustrated and have their efforts shit upon by its half-ass algorithm.
> Facebook trained the AI by finding patterns in the words and imagery used in posts that have been manually reported for suicide risk in the past. It also looks for comments like “are you OK?” and “Do you need help?”
It's kind of amusing that all the investment in ML/AI by the internet companies is part of how they'll be regulated. I suspect it won't be good enough for a long time anyway and they're just going to have to hire a lot more people.
I see the irony as well, but from a purely business standpoint, it makes sense. If Facebook gains and keeps a reputation of being intensely bad for mental health, it will lose market share in the long run as regulation passes limiting its scope.
This may or may not be a useful technology, but the fact that Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses is disturbing. They have more information about their users than psychologists have about their patients. They can (and do) build a psychological profile and diagnose mental illness. Yet rather than keeping this information in the closest confidence, they sell it to the highest bidder. They can (and do) run experiments without getting informed consent (or any consent).
They're playing psychologist and should be subject to a similar code of ethics.
If you talk about it outside a privileged context, you're implicitly waiving the privacy protections.
For example, if you run into your physician in public, and say, "Hi Doc. Have you gotten my test results back yet?" you're the one pointing out that she's your doctor, not her. If she, unprompted, said something about your test results to you, she'd have violated HIPAA.
HIPAA does, however, have a section explicitly governing the privacy of patient medical information, under Title II, generally known as "The Privacy Rule".
Probably.. any disclosure could potentially be regulated. This is a company creating a health care profile of you (possibly without your consent) and potentially sharing that information of you (without your consent or release) to other entities.. so maybe? I bet there will be several lawsuits to clarify things.
Unequivocally not. Posting to Facebook is a public disclosure Health data: no one, including your own physician, is obligated to protect that which you opt to publicly disclose.
We are talking about a Facebook AI program reading your posts and deciding if you are suicidal or not. I'm not even sure how you would clinically validate that and if it would require FDA clearance, but if you are forming a mental health opinion on a stream of data and contacting the government about it that is probably something that may need to be protected.
The medical school structured itnas a clinical trial with people volunteering to participate. Medical studies have different regulations than just reviewing public postings.
This is a reflection of the way they’ve chosen to go about things - no doubt in response to past kerfuffles - rather than an actual legal obligation on fb’s analysis of public materials.
HIPAA regs aren’t hidden from the public. Peruse at your leisure.
Absolutely not. HIPAA regulates the medical and insurance industries, which Facebook is certainly not. If you broadcast medical data to the public or put it in a newspaper HIPAA does not apply, much like this case.
Best case scenario, and this is still a stretch, is that Facebook could be guilty of slander if they describe you has suicidal and that description becomes known to a third party without your consent.
I think it is unclear. For example Apple has HealthKit which collects health related data.. That data is probably HIPAA protected. If it's not (and if Facebook is not) then I would imagine we will see legislation and/or lawsuits to clarify things.
Maybe, but I think health information disclosure has a lot of rules to it (at least based on my experience) where authorizations expire after 1 year etc... So I don't think a blanket exception applies. And although Facebook is a public forum not all communications are public per se so it's not clear what a disclosure is... maybe it is sufficient for Facebook to say that the information was "disclosed to us" and we are free to do what we want with it, including using an AI bot to alert emergency services. It seems like a big gray area.
> Facebook is a public forum not all communications are public per se so it's not clear what a disclosure is...
It doesn't matter. Once you surrender data to Facebook it is theirs to do whatever they want with. That is the disclosure. There is no gray area. If you don't want Facebook having that information then don't give it to them.
Facebook is known to collect key presses. If I express a desire to commit suicide in a status update, but don't actually post it, thus not showing it to anybody except Facebook, would that (should it?) be covered by HIPAA? What if I keep paper diary? What if it's in Google docs instead?
No, because you have no obligation to disclose anything to Facebook. If you choose to disclose this to Facebook that is your mistake. You absolutely must disclose medical information with a medical provider and with your insurance company.
> What if it's in Google docs instead?
If you didn't put it there than somebody has violated your privacy or violated HIPAA.
What would be cool is if someone could build a GAN based on the Facebook AI training set to spit out comments that would be indicative of certain moods. This capability would be great for autistic people trying to react appropriately in social situations... or an AI chatbot trying to act human.
I'm worried there's a taboo developing where only professionals or mentally ill people themselves are allowed to express any kind of opinion about mental illness or the mentally ill.
Well, let's be real you can hardly criticize someone without pathologizing it.
In the 1970s, people were worried about kids reading comic books and garbage novels.
In the 1980s-1990s, people were worried about kids playing too many video games or watching too much tv.
Now we're worried about internet addiction as though kids get itchy and cold without their fix. We can't just say "don't spend 8 hours/day watching TV. Go outside" - we have to use the language of healthcare.
I'm worried that the field of psychology is gaining a monopoly on expression of feelings. We can no longer express happiness and sadness, anxiety and frustration, without being "diagnosed" in a horoscopic manner which has little or nothing to do with science and bears a great deal of stigma.
The psychological disorders of today are the occult of yesterday. We believe that one can become possessed by depression or anxiety. Possessed by psychosis, possessed by a personality disorder, possessed by PTSD, possessed by a history of child abuse. And we have to call upon the psychologists to preform an exorcism.
You are free to reject diagnosis and medication unless you are determined a danger to yourself or others. HIPAA also gives you control over where your diagnoses travel.
Not with facebook, of course, which doesn’t qualify for hipaa protections yet.
Of course you are free to do so, but back in the days of daemon possession, most people were just as free to reject the claim that they were possessed. What mattered back then, was not the claim though, what mattered back then was that ordinary people would look at someone and think "oh he's acting weird, he must be possessed". And that "possessed person" would then be feared. It interfered with the process of empathy.
Well, HIPAA also protects you from your doctor telling your social circle. So i’m not quite clear on what the parallel to “being afraid of a possessed person” would be.
Great points, I wonder if FB actually employees psychologists and if so how many and what are their accreditations and level of professional experience.
Is there proof though? Id assume so, Im not sure psychologists follow a Hippocratic oath if they did this seems like it would cross a bit of a line, no?
Just one google search away. Keywords such as Facebook, psychology, experiments, ethics will generate lots of interesting reading, some of it with good sourcing and links for further reading.
It does for me, but there is always some excuse. Usually the mortgage or something to that effect.
Even more, we've seen articles which pointed out how using Facebook makes people more depressed and doesn't help with isolation, and loneliness. So in a terribly ironic way, Facebook is making them depressed, but then it doesn't want to them to die because there's nobody left to lick the "Like" button, so it deploys AI doctors to diagnose and prevent suicide from happening.
> Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses
Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.
Most of us accept some level of State interference in our lives for our own good. Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.
>Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.
That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.
And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.
> Most of us accept some level of State interference in our lives for our own good.
The state is elected by the people and is - at least nominally - meant to serve them.
> Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.
This is textbook Corporatocracy. I have neither the power to vote corporations in or out nor any recourse if they decide I need an "intervention". How is this not high-tech serfdom?
I think the core idea here is that if FB decides to work in this space, they should follow similar codes of ethics as, say, your local psychologist.
Its' _absolutely not_ OK for any of this information to get anywhere near the "targetted ads" part of their service. Imagine if you could advertise your alcohol products directly to alcoholics!
It's not OK for people to run explicit "psychological manipulation" experiments without the user's consent and without very specific rules with regards to the danger to the users. There's a reason why you don't replicate the prison experiment.
Maybe FB is already doing this in context of their algorithmic feed improvements. In that case they should already be asking for user consent when running these experiments.
It's not even that hard! "We're trying new changes to feeds to help show you content that is more relevant to you/more positive/etc. Click here if you want to opt-in. See here for details"
They can do right here, and I bet enough people within FB would like to do things "right", but might simply not be informed enough.
By the way they elevate moderation priority for posts and FB Live, I pessimisticly assume their primary concern is to prevent people from committing suicide ON Facebook Live, which is much worse for Facebook than simply loosing users
And does it not seem likely that the output of this model would be used as a signal to influence the newsfeed algorithm? It's like a feedback machine showing already depressed people pictures of happy families, making them even more depressed, yet more hooked, eventually leading to you-know-what.
> Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses
Was this ever stated in the article? There's a big difference between diagnosing someone with mental illness and recognizing when someone is in a suicidal crisis. If someone is publicly saying things like "I wish I was dead" and "I'm going to kill myself" on Facebook, it seems highly ethical to automatically escalate to a moderator ASAP rather than waiting for someone to report it.
If someone has a heart attack in the street, would you say "I'm not a doctor, so I don't have the ability or the right to diagnose what just happened"? No, you'd recognize that it's a serious emergency and find people who are able to help. This really isn't much different.
This is an unbelievably slippery slope. It has the potential for great good, but also for great harm. Cliched and click-bait phrases, but I believe they are accurate in this instance. I'll try to explain why I believe that.
A case has been made that Facebook users are not the customers, they are the product, and that data purchasers and advertisers are the customers. If Facebook can determine whether you are suicidal then it might determine other psychological conditions such as agoraphobia, alcoholism, depression, ADD, SAD, etc.
Once that determination is made and stored the possibility exists that it could be hacked or exposed in a data breach.
The possibility also would exist for Facebook to sell that information, and/or to target users with medical adds related to their condition. I am not saying Facebook would do this, I'd like to think they wouldn't - I have friends at Facebook, though they aren't in management.
However, the decision of whether to allow this has to be based not on whether it's safe to trust Facebook with this information, but on whether it is safe to trust any company with it.
What happens if there is a false positive for suicidal tendencies or another condition?
Take this to the absurd extreme and consider how it compares to the Pre-Crime operations depicted in the movie Minority Report. Instead of Oracles we have Machine Learning intelligent software agents. Most of the problems depicted in the movie could arise.
To a lesser extreme, imagine the situation when a false positive occurs for a user in a position of public trust, a government official, or a defense contractor with a clearance. I'll assume this triggers action in some way that is visible to some combination of the user, psychology professionals, authorities, and an employer - otherwise why do it. If the employer in any way catches wind of the determination they might very well take steps to flag and/or terminate the employee.
Even if the employer doesn't flag the employee or terminate them, if the information is purchasable or discoverable in any way then an insurance company could conceivably raise the user's rates based on the determination.
I am all for advancing technology, especially in the field of AI, but when we apply that technology we need to ask not just if we can use the technology in that way, but also if we should.
I don't think its a slippery slope - its more like the gaping precipice. Within a few generations, we will have members of society who believe such extreme manipulation is the norm. Well, its already here, anyway - but at what cost will we expose future generations to our idiotic, un-tested, software systems!!
Perhaps the only answer is to stop using the freakin' social web, but .. really .. how can we do that?
I agree with you. I see this being extended to other sorts of diseases/mental illnesses. If facebook thinks you are "harming" yourself with substance abuse, don't they have a moral obligation to report you and stop you? They'll do so with the opening sentence of the article:
> This is software to save lives.
Literally anything is justifiable with that pretense.
> Take this to the absurd extreme and consider how it compares to the Pre-Crime operations depicted in the movie Minority Report. Instead of Oracles we have Machine Learning intelligent software agents. Most of the problems depicted in the movie could arise.
Now, if this catches on, I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD. This would be a huge success. "Mr. Smith, I see Facebook's AI considers you a strong candidate for medication X and your doctor agrees. Can you explain then why you haven't been taking medication X?"
Also, if an algorithm can detect when a person is likely to commit suicide, can it detect when a person is likely to commit rape? Arson? Murder? If most of society views this as an achievement they'll scoff at comparisons with a book written in the middle of the 20th century (that was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise in 2002). "It's not the same... AT ALL!"
>I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD
imagine this: employers know that having these conditions (some of which are permanent) makes people less effective at working, and so they want to know who has adhd, who has x, y, z.
facebook sells them the data.
boom, now these people can't be employed by that company.
i just can't help but laugh because there's a good chance this is already happening.
This commit really reminds me of the anime "Psycho-Pass". They use an algorithm to detect criminals and stop them when their "score" goes above a certain threshold. Really interesting concept.
I know this is horribly cynical, but dead man's friends will probably be highly engaged with the platform afterward. Facebook will find a way to monetize it.
I was hoping they used data on people who actually committed suicide, but it looks like they're using activity that users reported and "expert opinion" instead.
if you're eager to separate the idea from the sanctity of life (or whatever), you can just throw this into the huge bucket of things we do as a society to dissuade behavior with significant negative externalities. and suicide does come with a lot of negative externalities
Do folks on HN actually think this is the only psychological metric Facebook is tracking, and that this is something new?
A slightly obsessive, insecure state of mind makes for the most engaged Facebook user. If they can give people a bit of a nudge in that direction, it’s great for business. Suicide, while resulting in increased engagement among friends and relatives, is bad for business overall — you’re losing users, and people might start to really question what you’re doing to their heads.
It’s amazing that this gets turned into a feelgood story by the press, rather than an investigation into what Facebook has known about their users’ mental states and for how long. This is like congratulating a tobacco company on warning people not to smoke 3 packs a day.
In general, I agree with you. That said, from the perspective of an actually dead teenager, where their friends turn in evidence that, in retrospect, maybe they were having a hard time, it's hard not to want something like this.
It is how to "cook the books" on the cost in blood of "social network". Teenage girls with gross depression are committing suicide at like 60% higher rate when they are active on social media. Facebook is absolutely a contributor there, and in order to disguise its actual complicity, its being a root-cause, it is now searching for clear signal of likelihood of suicide, with an attempt to ... what. What is their follow-up action? Inform a parent or legal authority? No way. That makes them culpable. They aren't going to "help". They are going to hide. They are going to destroy chains of evidence in on the "wall" or "messages" that point a clear finger at the paradigm as the problem.
There's a lot of people who are fearful that Facebook probably knows too much about its users and that could be problematic. But what do you expect? How do you want our future to be shaped? Innovation, including AI, requires tremendous amount of data. Suicide is a serious problem and being able to accurately identify that in the future could save tons of lives. Accurately diagnosing mental illnesses will take a while for sure, and I believe this is a necessary first step.
Now, if Facebook is selling the data for profit, that's another story. But if we assume that Facebook is acting purely for the benefit of the society and the people, I think this is a great step.
> But if we assume that Facebook is acting purely for the benefit of the society and the people, I think this is a great step.
Why would anyone ever assume this? Does anything in Facebook's past suggests that this might be the case? And even if the motives of the individuals who spearheaded this were pure is there any reason to think that this won't change in the future as people at Facebook change roles or move on?
>outrage<
I do NOT give Facebook - or any other party - permission to know if the Suicide Bit is flipped.... S'rsly, is anyone else not having a serious "WTF!" moment about the very substance of where we are at?
>/outrage<
No, because you do not own data you submit to Facebook. It is their data and they can do anything they want with it. If you find that disgusting then don't give data to Facebook.
Yes, of course. The irony is not lost; no matter what, you can't really erase yourself from existence.
Facebook will, at least, maintain the shrine.
Perhaps this is its true purpose - to remember dead people?
I think it will become that. I wonder if there is an event horizon where all of the initial Facebook users expire, and only a new set live on - I imagine it'd be way into the future - 3 or 4 generations?
Soon enough, Facebook is gonna be the grave, itself.
159 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread"Dave, you should stop thinking about killing yourself!"
- "But...I wasn't thinking about killing myself?!"
"Come on, Dave, deep down you know you want to. You can't fool me! I know everything about you."
"- Well, now that I think about it, watching Facebook all day does make me feel quite depressed..."
Curious what these were.
There was an bad issue with a place I cared enough about to try to correct, so I ventured into the "community" they setup to build their training set to try to get it fixed. It was such a depressing place. Hundreds of people tricked by gamification into working for free for a for-profit company, only to be frustrated and have their efforts shit upon by its half-ass algorithm.
> Facebook trained the AI by finding patterns in the words and imagery used in posts that have been manually reported for suicide risk in the past. It also looks for comments like “are you OK?” and “Do you need help?”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/facebook_makes_you_...
Please watch "Soylent Green" and "The Matrix" and come back with a good reason for why corporations should be allowed to commercialise death services.
k'thxbai.
From a business perspective, they want to make them depressed, dependent, but alive.
Treat the causes (some of them at least), not the consequences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
They're playing psychologist and should be subject to a similar code of ethics.
Another interesting article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
(Like me talking that I'm type 2 diabetic?)
For example, if you run into your physician in public, and say, "Hi Doc. Have you gotten my test results back yet?" you're the one pointing out that she's your doctor, not her. If she, unprompted, said something about your test results to you, she'd have violated HIPAA.
It's your privacy to waive as you please.
HIPAA does, however, have a section explicitly governing the privacy of patient medical information, under Title II, generally known as "The Privacy Rule".
EDIT: Tone and specificity.
This is a reflection of the way they’ve chosen to go about things - no doubt in response to past kerfuffles - rather than an actual legal obligation on fb’s analysis of public materials.
HIPAA regs aren’t hidden from the public. Peruse at your leisure.
Best case scenario, and this is still a stretch, is that Facebook could be guilty of slander if they describe you has suicidal and that description becomes known to a third party without your consent.
"If an entity does not meet the definition of a covered entity or business associate, it does not have to comply with the HIPAA Rules."
[0] - https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...
Sneaky suspicion: consent is given upon account registration.
It doesn't matter. Once you surrender data to Facebook it is theirs to do whatever they want with. That is the disclosure. There is no gray area. If you don't want Facebook having that information then don't give it to them.
> What if it's in Google docs instead?
If you didn't put it there than somebody has violated your privacy or violated HIPAA.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/faceb...
In the 1970s, people were worried about kids reading comic books and garbage novels.
In the 1980s-1990s, people were worried about kids playing too many video games or watching too much tv.
Now we're worried about internet addiction as though kids get itchy and cold without their fix. We can't just say "don't spend 8 hours/day watching TV. Go outside" - we have to use the language of healthcare.
The psychological disorders of today are the occult of yesterday. We believe that one can become possessed by depression or anxiety. Possessed by psychosis, possessed by a personality disorder, possessed by PTSD, possessed by a history of child abuse. And we have to call upon the psychologists to preform an exorcism.
Not with facebook, of course, which doesn’t qualify for hipaa protections yet.
Just one google search away. Keywords such as Facebook, psychology, experiments, ethics will generate lots of interesting reading, some of it with good sourcing and links for further reading.
It does for me, but there is always some excuse. Usually the mortgage or something to that effect.
And now a company with extremely powerful AI capabilities want to fine-tune the addiction algorithm to maximize profits.
Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.
Most of us accept some level of State interference in our lives for our own good. Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.
That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.
And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.
They may have nudged on one particular code of ethics.
Alarmism does not help your credibility.
Of course! You can’t show ads to dead people...
The state is elected by the people and is - at least nominally - meant to serve them.
> Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.
This is textbook Corporatocracy. I have neither the power to vote corporations in or out nor any recourse if they decide I need an "intervention". How is this not high-tech serfdom?
Its' _absolutely not_ OK for any of this information to get anywhere near the "targetted ads" part of their service. Imagine if you could advertise your alcohol products directly to alcoholics!
It's not OK for people to run explicit "psychological manipulation" experiments without the user's consent and without very specific rules with regards to the danger to the users. There's a reason why you don't replicate the prison experiment.
Maybe FB is already doing this in context of their algorithmic feed improvements. In that case they should already be asking for user consent when running these experiments.
It's not even that hard! "We're trying new changes to feeds to help show you content that is more relevant to you/more positive/etc. Click here if you want to opt-in. See here for details"
They can do right here, and I bet enough people within FB would like to do things "right", but might simply not be informed enough.
Was this ever stated in the article? There's a big difference between diagnosing someone with mental illness and recognizing when someone is in a suicidal crisis. If someone is publicly saying things like "I wish I was dead" and "I'm going to kill myself" on Facebook, it seems highly ethical to automatically escalate to a moderator ASAP rather than waiting for someone to report it.
If someone has a heart attack in the street, would you say "I'm not a doctor, so I don't have the ability or the right to diagnose what just happened"? No, you'd recognize that it's a serious emergency and find people who are able to help. This really isn't much different.
A case has been made that Facebook users are not the customers, they are the product, and that data purchasers and advertisers are the customers. If Facebook can determine whether you are suicidal then it might determine other psychological conditions such as agoraphobia, alcoholism, depression, ADD, SAD, etc.
Once that determination is made and stored the possibility exists that it could be hacked or exposed in a data breach.
The possibility also would exist for Facebook to sell that information, and/or to target users with medical adds related to their condition. I am not saying Facebook would do this, I'd like to think they wouldn't - I have friends at Facebook, though they aren't in management.
However, the decision of whether to allow this has to be based not on whether it's safe to trust Facebook with this information, but on whether it is safe to trust any company with it.
What happens if there is a false positive for suicidal tendencies or another condition?
Take this to the absurd extreme and consider how it compares to the Pre-Crime operations depicted in the movie Minority Report. Instead of Oracles we have Machine Learning intelligent software agents. Most of the problems depicted in the movie could arise.
To a lesser extreme, imagine the situation when a false positive occurs for a user in a position of public trust, a government official, or a defense contractor with a clearance. I'll assume this triggers action in some way that is visible to some combination of the user, psychology professionals, authorities, and an employer - otherwise why do it. If the employer in any way catches wind of the determination they might very well take steps to flag and/or terminate the employee.
Even if the employer doesn't flag the employee or terminate them, if the information is purchasable or discoverable in any way then an insurance company could conceivably raise the user's rates based on the determination.
I am all for advancing technology, especially in the field of AI, but when we apply that technology we need to ask not just if we can use the technology in that way, but also if we should.
Perhaps the only answer is to stop using the freakin' social web, but .. really .. how can we do that?
This is almost, really, the last straw, Facebook!
> This is software to save lives.
Literally anything is justifiable with that pretense.
This is the first thing I thought of.
Now, if this catches on, I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD. This would be a huge success. "Mr. Smith, I see Facebook's AI considers you a strong candidate for medication X and your doctor agrees. Can you explain then why you haven't been taking medication X?"
Also, if an algorithm can detect when a person is likely to commit suicide, can it detect when a person is likely to commit rape? Arson? Murder? If most of society views this as an achievement they'll scoff at comparisons with a book written in the middle of the 20th century (that was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise in 2002). "It's not the same... AT ALL!"
/s
imagine this: employers know that having these conditions (some of which are permanent) makes people less effective at working, and so they want to know who has adhd, who has x, y, z.
facebook sells them the data.
boom, now these people can't be employed by that company.
i just can't help but laugh because there's a good chance this is already happening.
But no matter. I’m sure there’s no rule against the company taking out ads advertising open positions to people who don’t have those issues.
Tada. Nothing illegal happened, but discrimination still did.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/13601/Psycho-Pass
A slightly obsessive, insecure state of mind makes for the most engaged Facebook user. If they can give people a bit of a nudge in that direction, it’s great for business. Suicide, while resulting in increased engagement among friends and relatives, is bad for business overall — you’re losing users, and people might start to really question what you’re doing to their heads.
It’s amazing that this gets turned into a feelgood story by the press, rather than an investigation into what Facebook has known about their users’ mental states and for how long. This is like congratulating a tobacco company on warning people not to smoke 3 packs a day.
I want their PR team.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-contributi...
Now, if Facebook is selling the data for profit, that's another story. But if we assume that Facebook is acting purely for the benefit of the society and the people, I think this is a great step.
Why would anyone ever assume this? Does anything in Facebook's past suggests that this might be the case? And even if the motives of the individuals who spearheaded this were pure is there any reason to think that this won't change in the future as people at Facebook change roles or move on?
Facebook will, at least, maintain the shrine.
Perhaps this is its true purpose - to remember dead people?
I think it will become that. I wonder if there is an event horizon where all of the initial Facebook users expire, and only a new set live on - I imagine it'd be way into the future - 3 or 4 generations?
Soon enough, Facebook is gonna be the grave, itself.
I don't have a Facebook user, but I wonder how much goodwill Facebook has in the bank with its user when it comes to things like this.