How Should LetsRun.com Handle Posts About People Saying They May Commit Suicide ?

I just want to clear up the legal liability thing for you all. The ONLY way letsrun would ever be liable is if the admins encouraged the OP to "do it" or read posts of others doing that and did not delete those posts. Deleting the thread would NEVER make them liable.

You can say they have a moral responsibility not to delete if that is your opinion, but you can't say they have a legal liability.

I was referring more to moral culpability. The relevant case law suggests that, for liability to be established, a special relationship (e.g., medical professional--patient) would likely have to exist between the deceased and the defendant. It's not impossible to find letsrun admins legally responsible, just not very likely.

Wejo, it very well could have been Hale Ross asking for help. (Not that it matters who it was) I think I remember seeing that the suicide poster was a registered user using a throwaway IP. Someone on this or another Hale Ross thread said they have screenshots of the cached thread. Would be interesting to see that.

Wejo,

Why delete those threads, especially in light of your statement that most of the replies were thoughtful?

I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that someone could come here and start a thread like that as a cry for help. This is a serious issue and you should encourage an open dialog.

Henius and Pauline -please stop insulting one another. Your back and forth is not contributing to the thread and we just remove those posts.

Pauline Phillips wrote:

I can comprehend suicide. Hell, I can even spell it correctly. LRC posters are aware of the possibility of being trolled. The suicide poster certainly took this risk knowingly, hoping that there would be someone out there who understood and could help. And he was right to take that chance; all the responses were positive and helpful. What he was not aware of, however, was that his cries for help would be deleted. Therefore, if the poster indeed killed himself after that, there is some amount of culpability on the part of the mod who deleted the post.

A few things. We are trying to figure out the best policy. You seem to think it is a) leave up the thread.

We discussed it and think a perfectly reasonable response is to delete the thread and put an alert to the IP address.

Legally we have no liability regardless of what we do. I am pretty positive of that. Morally if we deleted the post and put a warning to the IP address I would not feel any culpability. We tried to do what we thought was right. I would feel terrible for the suicide and wonder if we should have done something different which is why we started this thread.

The drawbacks to leaving up all suicide threads area) posters who may think the person is trolling and say something insensitive or encourage it (or are just horribly human beings and encourage it) - we could alleviate this by pre-screening all posts on the thread b) People who start the threads as sick trolling attempts.

Maybe we shouldn't be worried about b) but often times we've thought that's what some of these posts or threads were.

If the IP address traced to a school we would likely try and contact it. Usually they trace to something like comcast kansas city and we feel without a court order we're not going to figure out who it is.

I work for a crisis hotline in Australia which is primarily focussed on suicide prevention. I'm not sure exactly what support services are available in the US, but from the above posts it sounds like there are a range similar to Australia.

I think Wejo's original approach was well thought out and compassionate, any suggestion that he or letsrun are culpable for someone else's decision to suicide is obnoxious.

No matter what, if someone suicides the only person responsible for that decision is that person. No one should ever take responsibility for someone else's mental health. Support, yes; but never take responsibility.

The only possible exception I could think of is people who actively encourage someone to suicide, clearly not what Wejo was doing.

Also, plenty of people aren't aware of MH support services, or aren't in the right head space to make rational decisions to reach out to them.

I would suggest some minor tweaks to the wording of his response, and I will write to Wejo seperately to offer some thoughts on that but Pauline's posts on here were too obnoxious to ignore.

wejo wrote:

Legally we have no liability regardless of what we do.

That's not entirely true. I'm sure you've heard of the Rutgers case.

Pauline Phillips wrote:

Wejo, it very well could have been Hale Ross asking for help. (Not that it matters who it was) I think I remember seeing that the suicide poster was a registered user using a throwaway IP. Someone on this or another Hale Ross thread said they have screenshots of the cached thread. Would be interesting to see that.

Pauline- Please do not try and tie this to Hale Ross. We have posted this on multiple threads (and I mentioned it at the start of this thread) but I will post it again.

The poster who said they were contemplating suicide was not using a proxy IP address. It was from a cable company not an anonymous IP address from Kansas City.

Respect to wejo for your thougtful and compassionate consideration of this challenging issue.

When someone is having a crisis and contemplates suicide, it's logical that they would come to a message board where they feel anonymous and can talk to people they think are like them. Sadly, this may be the only place someone feels like they can "talk" to someone else.

While this board has a lot of trash talk, there are some really honest, really good responses to people asking for help on a variety of issues and this is exactly what someone considering suicide needs at that time.

When one of these threads is started how about posting a response similar to what you did and providing information about the suicide hot line. Leave the thread up and let people respond but delete any irresponsible comments.

This is a tough one. What may work and help one oerson may have the opposite effect on another.

I feel you did the right thing. I am not for keeping the suicide thread up but I don't think there is a right answer.

For people who think it should be deleted, what is your reasoning?

You posted this Weldon to ward off potential lawsuits.

You never stopped the many times I emailed you about pushing Henry Rono to the brink with your thread about the record mile.

You were incredibly irresponsible then.

I have to think you have better lawyers now.

If people want to post about suicide on LRC, then they are willing to hear the troll chatter.

off base wrote:

For people who think it should be deleted, what is your reasoning?

I am NOT in favor of deletion, but here is my guess:

People understand that it is not realistic to expect Letsrun to closely monitor any specific threads simply because they contain some"keyword". What kind of staff do you think they employ?!? I am pretty sure no one at LRC is being paid to sit around and watchdog threads for hours on end.

Sure, threads are monitored and posts get deleted. Not immediately though. It takes until a mod can get to it. This could be too late in a sensitive thread. The damage could be done. Safer to get rid of the thread altogether.

Well said. If I was contemplating suicide, I might reach out to friends, but I would never ever call a suicide hotline. Cutting off a suicidal person's possibly one and only cry for help is pushing them to a dire consequence.

My recommendation is to not remove any post unless someone is being in the gutter and/or abusive to others. Even if a post seems innocuous, there's a person on the other side of it.

I still think deleting individual posts over deleting entire threads is preferred here.

We see other threads like the main candidates debate thread stay up while individual bad posts get deleted.

There can't be that many suicide threads going up on a regular basis to monitor.

There trolls here aren't that mean if the topic is serious.

The Cancer Guy thread was filled with positive comments.

It's very hard & takes a lot of guts to call a help line to talk. Those who are depressed or are contemplating suicide post those threads because they want someone to talk with about it. Letsrun being anonymous, is easy to do this. It's way easier to post a thread here compared to picking up the cell & talking with someone over the phone.

I lean to leaving a thread up, BUT if suicide is in a thread title or original post, then require all replies to be approved by a moderator. That my be too much a responsibility for mods though. Leave the thread up for 12 hours though & delete it.

Seems this thread is now going the way of most LRC threads. Might as well lock it or delete now.

Same old... wrote:

Seems this thread is now going the way of most LRC threads. Might as well lock it or delete now.

Unfortunately, I agree.

I think this discussion is necessary to have, and I applaud wejo for starting it.

I think it should be handled on a case to case basis, where if 'suicide' is included or some other form of filtration it's marked for rejection or approval by admins. If it's clearly a troll attempt you delete it with the message you stated earlier, but if it seems real you leave it up. Though this might just increase the trolls since they'd want to 'trick' the admins, but I think the reward is greater than the risk. That trolling doesn't necessarily cause anyone any harm, other than minutes of someone's time. But if this is the only safe method of reaching out for someone, it might be important to keep this line of communication open.

If we start getting 10+ suicide threads a day then sure, it's spam just like anything else, this is a running form after all.