I have had experiences with that kind of “therapy” that’s like connecting you to other ppl who are also suffering on the internet, and you’re meant to help each other. At the lowest of my PTSD, while I was waiting for an appointment at the therapy centre to open up, I would dig up tumblr looking for online resources.
One time when I was feeling really overwhelmed, I went on blahblahtherapy. I was lucky that the person I got in contact with was an adult (I was barely 18 at the time I think), and he gave me pretty sound advice about my abusive father. But he also wanted to continue chatting outside of that (blahblahtherapy times your discussion up to 15 minutes and disconnects you after that) so I added him on discord. And there, we would chat about completely different stuff but that guy knew I was young and vulnerable, and when I told him I do cosplay he wanted to see pics of me. He also told me he spends a lot of time on blahblahtherapy because he likes talking to people (weird place to do that…).
I ended up ghosting him because I felt like I was falling back into a pattern of talking too intimately with older men. In the end I’ll never know if his intentions were actually nefarious or if he was just some guy, but it shows how easy it is for ill-intended adults to prey on helpless younger users in this kind of environment…
KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users’ Mental Health Crises for “Content”
I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.
Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)
But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.
I couldn’t even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I’m glad I stopped to read, because:
What you say on there won’t be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn’t even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
Also, what you say on there? Is now…
Koko’s intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
Publicly performing or displaying your “content” (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
Sell / share this “content” with other businesses
Any harm you come to using Koko? That’s on you.
And Koko won’t take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)
They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn’t find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of “People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find”. Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.
So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.
(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don’t read if you’re not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)
Their company summary reading as “AI Powered Community Moderation” really stood out to me, as at first glance it’s not what they market themselves as.
But after reading through the rest of the post, and seeing their list of ‘customers’ on their website it’s obvious what’s going on. The apparently unmoderated, highly dangerous chat service where they throw extremely vulnerable people (and presumably the people who want to take advantage of them) at each other in the name of 'mental health support’ is not their product. Their product is a bot that crawls social media content to flag posts for moderation. The chat service is just a data harvesting ploy. They need a large body of example text of people experiencing mental health crises to train their bot on. The chat service lets them harvest that.
This company is selling a tool to help social media companies automatically detect at risk users and provide them with links to mental health services. Which sounds perfectly fine until you realise that it’s building that tool in the most breathtakingly irresponsible and immoral way imaginable.
This is part of a growing trend of “let’s tell people in crisis to help each other - remove all the trained therapists from the discussion and get them to pay money for bells & whistles (and possibly therapists, at over-the-counter rates only you can’t use insurance for them)” sites.
ALT
