According to an email I received earlier this afternoon, I should be worried about the mental state of someone I know. An alert popped up in my inbox from an app called ‘Radar‘ which the Samaritans launched this week, telling me a tweet from someone I followed might suggest they were contemplating suicide. Here’s the tweet:
Clearly the Samaritans need to work on their formula, otherwise I’ll be receiving daily alerts whenever Jim Murphy warns against Scottish Labour committing electoral self-harm or one Conservative faction warns another faction that it is being politically suicidal.
The Samaritans say they pursued the app, which monitors certain words and phrases in tweets before alerting users signed up to the service, because social media ‘is increasingly being used as an outlet for people to share their feelings’ and that ‘there are some who may go online in the hope that someone will reach out and offer support’.
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