GoKawiilMeta has announced that parents can receive alerts when their teens discuss suicide or other forms of self-harm with its AI on Instagram, Facebook, or Meta Horizons.
You’ll need to opt in to Meta’s supervision tools for parents and guardians in order to select the family accounts you want to supervise …
Meta says the new feature supplements existing safety measures.
When a teen suggests they may be thinking about suicide or self-harm, Meta AI already directs them to crisis helplines and encourages them to reach out to a parent or another trusted adult like a counselor. Now, we’ll also proactively alert supervising parents if their teen’s Meta AI chat suggests they may be at risk, based on signals developed with experts. We’ll share expert resources to help parents approach these conversations with their teens.
The company says it aims to detect even relatively subtle references, but all flagged chats will be manually reviewed.
We understand how distressing these alerts may be for a parent to receive. That’s why, as we continue to improve our detection, all chats flagged by our AI will be manually reviewed before an alert is sent. If a teen’s intent is ambiguous, we’ll err on the side of caution and alert the parent. While that means we may sometimes notify parents when there may not be real cause for concern, we feel this is the right starting point, and we’ll continue to monitor to help make sure we’re in the right place.
You’ll need to begin by setting up family supervision for accounts used by your children if you haven’t already done so. The new feature is currently available in the US, Canada, UK and Australia.
Meta currently alerts emergency services when it detects a credible risk of suicide in a Facebook or Instagram post, and says it will be extending this to Meta AI in future.
We’re building the ability to contact emergency services if someone’s conversation — whether an adult or a teen — with Meta AI suggests that they may be at imminent risk of taking their own life. This builds on the work we already do across Facebook and Instagram: when we become aware of a post suggesting a credible risk of suicide, we alert emergency services. Last year, we made over 19,000 such referrals around the world, helping first responders perform wellness checks on people who may be at risk of suicide.
If you’re feeling at risk yourself, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. You can also call 911 or go to an ER room and request help for a mental health emergency.
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