September marks Suicide Prevention Month, a time to recognize the people impacted by suicide and suicidal thoughts, as well as the importance of working together to raise awareness and take preventive steps. A new collaboration aims to fulfill the latter, with Meta teaming up with the Mental Health Coalition to create Thrive, a signal-sharing program. Thrive should allow participating companies to send signals about content focused on self-harm or suicide to each other, thus locating and investigating the same or similar posts more easily. Snap and TikTok join Meta as founding members. Thrive will initially work through companies providing hashes (codes corresponding to the violating content), each one only providing information about the image or video and not including specific user or account information. Meta says it will prioritize content that is graphic or depicting or promoting viral challenges around suicide or self-harm. Meta announced the news in a statement and shared it’s providing Thrive’s technical infrastructure, acknowledging the need for cross-platform collaboration. Thrive’s director, Dr. Dan Reidenberg, will oversee the program, stating that the integration of signal sharing, coupled with cross-industry collaboration and moderated by an independent and neutral intermediary, represents a major breakthrough in industry collaboration to protect public health in the global crisis of suicide and ultimately save lives. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 or you can simply dial 988. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.
