Can Radian6 be used to prevent suicides and murders?

Sep 22

Can Radian6 be used to prevent suicides and murders?

by Jonathan Nguyen
Category: Australia, Digital Influence

I’ve been thinking lately that we could potentially use social media monitoring tools to prevent suicides and mass murders. The idea struck me as I was working with some clients on a couple of issues / crisis management projects lately.

In the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye. Killer George Sodini went berserk in a Pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. The thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. That’s when the idea sparked.

So I did some digging

It’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. With a quick search, I found Paul Zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on Facebook and did. More interestingly though, I found Hsu Yu-sheng.

Hsu Yu-sheng

Hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in Taiwan, who on August 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in English. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. Friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

Police arrived at Hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

The idea

We use social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. It’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

How it would work

Radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords
Suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. Radian6 is has a automatic Sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments
Results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

There would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. What it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 5:27 am and is filed under Australia, Digital Influence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Comments
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Tags: Blogging, brands, Facebook, homicide, media, Monitoring, prevention, suicide, work

Technorati Tags: Blogging, brands, Facebook, homicide, media, Monitoring, prevention, suicide, work

5 Responses to “Can Radian6 be used to prevent suicides and murders?”

Vijay Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:24 am
Interesting but doable concept. You’d still need a stage of human analysis before calling in the doc/cops as twitter is full of “i could kill my (insert favorite service provider here) or as i read a student’s tweet today–”i am going to kill my TQM prof”!
Ogilvy PR should tie up with a city council and launch it as a social social initiative.
Derek J Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 am
An excellent idea, (Vijay) I think you could use the existing infrastructure i.e. people who are on suicide hotlines and counselling centres that already deal with this issue. The advantage of course is that companies like Radian6 provide a highly effective interface to display the information. Additionally I think you could use Radian6 technology in crime fighting i.e. pedophillia.
Benedict Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Yep, I think the potential is definitely there in using social media and social media monitoring tools to help prevent suicides and aid crime fighting. I was actually just reading this article about how a Facebook page helped a family locate their missing son. http://bit.ly/Lc2iH

The key is having existing organizations (law enforcement, hotline centers) see where they can integrate social media into their current process and allocate resource to support it.
Brian Giesen Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:40 pm
An interesting idea, Jonathan. Imagine it might also involve a company like Radian6 partnering up with a non-profit organisation, such as the Suicide Hotline or National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (a U.S. non-profit) to provide the service and a bit of training.
Jonathan Nguyen Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Vijay, Derek, Benedict and Brian – There’s alot of potential here and it would be great for an organisation to get on board.

In fairness, Radian6 commented on my original posting of this over on the Howorth blog and were keen to explore something if we could put something together with a not for profit. See their response here: http://www.howorth.com.au/index.php/2009/09/radian6-prevent-suicides-murders/

Vijay is right and there definitely needs to be an extra layer of smarts built on top of keyword search to make the hits more relevant. As you all know what happens in any campaign often the killer is not to few, but too many results.