“Earlier that day, a local woman wrote a Facebook post saying she was walking home and intended to kill herself when she got there, according to a police report on the case. Facebook called to warn the Police Department about the suicide threat.”
Amazing this is considered bad by the commenters here.
So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal? You don't see how something like that could be wildly misinterpreted in written form, without context, without voice tone, etc?
It's easy to feel like what you say online doesn't really count. People feel that way all the time and that fact often causes problems. Usually, though, those problems don't involve someone calling the cops on you "for your own good." At most, you get banned from some forum.
They do have context given how much of a person’s internet life they can “see”. While you can argue that is bad, if they have enough signal a person is likely to do harm and the person says something like that, it seems like it’s a net positive for Facebook to alert someone to help the person out.
I do a helluva lot of commenting online via twitter, various forums and a bunch of blogs. Over the years, I've gotten much more careful about the things I say online on specific topics because people routinely imagine they know me better than they do based on having read my writing for so many years.
So my experience really doesn't fit with what you are saying at all. My experience is that what people say online is the tip of the iceberg of their life and the world imagines it has greater context than it really has and leaps to weird and inaccurate conclusions on a pretty regular basis.
Trying to figure out how to express myself so I feel like I'm actually understood takes an inordinate amount of my time. I have reason to believe most other people don't spend anywhere near as much time and effort as I do on trying to sort that out.
Most of the time, most people don't seem to get as wildly and horrifically misunderstood as I seem to so often end up being. Or if they are misunderstood, it isn't that big of a deal in many cases.
But I remain aghast at the idea of someone calling the cops on me because of something I have said online that people imagine they understood that was not a "threat" against anyone but me.
On top of being skeptical that Facebook understands you as well as you imagine they do, I am also pro right to die.
In a nutshell, if people give a damn about my sorry ass, they could choose to do something meaningful in the here and now to help me make my life work instead of being part of the problem, making my life harder than it already is and then pretending to themselves they are Good People by calling the god-damned cops on me for leaving a fucking courtesy note somewhere online if I decide to finally check the fuck out of here.
Note to self: Don't bother to leave a courtesy note online informing anyone of fuck all. They really don't deserve such courtesies. Geez.
Amazing this is considered bad by the commenters here.