Death goes liveIJ Suicide rates are high in India and now killing oneself is being fetishized
If we as a society are failing to maintain the sanctity of life, our collective future is doomed. It is a dire prognosis, for sure, but one that is entirely justified given not just the casual brutality of violence in our everyday lives but also the sharp spike in suicide rates in India, especially among the young. According to the data made available by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in Parliament, suicide rates among students have skyrocketed with almost 26,500 deaths between 2014 and 2016. Earlier, studies such as the one by in 2012 by lancet had flagged India as having one of the world's highest suicide rates for the age group of 15 to 29. But it gets worse. Now, all that is between “what's trending” and “what's new” is looking increasingly bleak. And a question this newspaper thought it would never have to ask must be posed: Is live streaming suicide a part of a youth trendIJ This month, at least 2,750 viewers watched a 24-year-old live stream his suicide. Nobody raised an alarm or bothered to inform the authorities. A similar incident took place in West Bengal, where a 12-year-old boy committed suicide during a live video call with his 'girlfriend'. In April, another man discussed his suicide on live television before jumping from the 19th floor of a hotel in Mumbai.
Popular social media site Facebook, with a user base of 250 million in India alone, that boasts of its sophisticated algorithms to deal with millions of units of data in nanoseconds, could not do anything to prevent such dreadful acts from happening. One can't blame them, really. Facebook had assigned a host of human moderators and integrated suicide combat tools in Messenger and Facebook live to help users in real time. But even Facebook's highly advanced AI systems have limited capability to monitor live videos or images to understand if a user is hinting at or even speaking about suicide in a live stream. Facebook cannot flag content on its own, it has to be done manually by a user. Hence, if one of the viewers of the suicides had flagged the contents, perhaps such mishaps could have been averted. The act of publicly ending one's life is turning out to be one of the more horrific ‘trends' of recent times. In 2018 itself, many instances have been reported. Social media is building walls in the name of bridging gaps. It's time we started to talk to young people — may be their changing moods and silences have a lot more to them than a mood swing. We will be failing our children if we don't.