Why Facebook Kept Up Photos of a Marine's Bloody Suicide

The following was imbedded in the previous story and it is a disturbing read but offers hope when one reads the comments (which I highly recommend as there is some interesting follow-up provided by the author).

Despite the intervention of so many individuals—and other advocacy groups like the VA's crisis hotline and Battles in Distress, according to Wolfe's online friends—the photos remained up.

"It hurt and outraged me," Tripp says. "When we would report the pictures they would tell us thank you for trying to make Facebook a safer place, but the images didn't violate their terms and conditions. When it clearly says images of self harm and mutilation are against their policy. How does leaving those pictures up make Facebook safer?"

His comrades began to stew inwardly, and to vent on Facebook. "I wish we could have done something," one wrote to a fellow member of their old unit. "I just hope you weren't on his other profile..."

His friend replied: "I didn't want to link that profile because I didn't want people to see that. It pisses me off that facebook won't remove those pics I've asked numerous times as have many other people."

[,,,]

"The research tells us that there is an increased risk of 'contagion' with suicide where graphic images are posted," he said. But where to draw the line between acceptable and taboo content is difficult, all the more so for a company with hundreds of millions of users posting content: "Just the photo itself, as graphic as it is, just the image, we can see lots of that online."

Nevertheless, Reidenberg reassured me, Facebook "has been at the lead of that effort" to deal with cases in the most sensitive way possible. "They take it very seriously."

Dr. Craig Bryan, a psychology professor who runs the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, told me in an email that the images "could trigger other vulnerable peers"—but an even bigger concern to him is that they could stall the grief recovery process, especially among those who attempted to reach out and intervene. Wolfe's friends may be naturally tempted to experience survivors' guilt, a sense that they didn't do enough, Bryan says, and the photos could be a visual representation of their perceived failures:

Why Facebook Kept Up Photos of a Marine's Bloody Suicide