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How social media helped save a life this week

November 15, 2013 By Anne Leave a Comment

Rarely do we see news stories about how social media can save lives, but that’s literally what happened in the metropolitan New York area this week. An 18-year-old posted in Facebook that he was thinking about jumping off the George Washington Bridge, and “a concerned Facebook user who saw the post contacted local New Jersey police, who then called the Port Authority Police Department, which has authority over the bridge,” NBC News reported. The Port Authority police found the young man’s Facebook page and “reached out with a plea to call their precinct” while also sending his photo to officers patrolling the bridge. Two hours after they reached out to him in Facebook, he called them from a bus. They talked for about 10 min., and the young man (who was not identified in the story) volunteered to be taken to a local hospital for evaluation after the Port Authority police arranged to give him a ride at the bus’s next stop.

The Port Authority police told NBC that they’d used social network sites before “to verify threats and gather background information but had never used them before to communicate directly with someone.” How wonderful that the first time they did reach out in a social site, someone was helped. Suicide prevention experts have been saying for years now that, especially in our very user-driven social media environment, people on the friends list of a person in crisis are often that person’s best “gatekeepers” and pre-first responders – life-savers.

In a social media environment, there’s no single first responder anymore. This is distributed, or social, first response. The life-saving in this case was shared by the concerned Facebook user who called the police, a Facebook page, at least three different police agencies (the New Jersey police who took the user’s call, the Port Authority Police and the police local to the young man’s bus route) and the young man who could see on his Facebook page that people cared enough to help. [Thanks to Russella Sabella, expert on school counseling and education professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, for pointing this story out.]

Related links

  • “Grassroots suicide prevention in Facebook”
  • “The Net & suicide: Another view”
  • “A summit for saving lives”
  • And, back in 2007, the story of when the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline noticed that MySpace – not the Lifeline’s toll-free number – had become its No. 1 source of referrals and social media users had truly become the other first responders
  • ConnectSafely.org’s Resources for Youth in Crisis page
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Filed Under: Risk & Safety, Social Media, suicide Tagged With: Facebook, New York Port Authority, Social Media, suicide prevention

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
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Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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