Facebook Has Launched A Way To Reach Out To Friends Who Might Be Suicidal

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Today, in a partnership with Now Matters Now, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Save.org and Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention, Facebook began rolling out a new way to privately contact a friend you might consider a suicide risk. If someone posts something that concerns you, you can select “Report Post” and will be given options to contact your friend, ask another friend for help or get in touch with a suicide hotline. Facebook will then review the post and contact the poster if need be. Then, that poster will get this notification upon next log-in.

They’ll then be directed to support tools, like a suicide helpline, a friend or a suicide prevention expert.

Facebook has had a way to report potentially suicidal content since 2011, but this is the first time this support will be built directly into posts. Until now, you had to seek out Facebook’s suicide prevention page and upload a screenshot or URL of the post.

The new reporting feature is currently available for 50 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. and will roll out to the rest of the country in the next few months, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Huffington Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“We have teams working around the world, 24/7, who review any report that comes in,” Rob Boyle, Facebook Product Manager and Nicole Staubli, Facebook Community Operations Safety Specialist, wrote in a post for Facebook Safety on Wednesday. “They prioritize the most serious reports, like self-injury, and send help and resources to those in distress.”

Source: Huffington Post

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