That's just not possible,” John Draper, the longtime former director of 988/Lifeline, told Motherboard. “It'd be great if we had a human being that could respond to every single person in crisis online. Experts consulted by Motherboard described the study using terms ranging from “distasteful” to “inexcusable.” Koko founder Rob Morris, though, defended the study’s design by pointing out that social media companies aren’t doing enough for at-risk users and that seeking informed consent from participants might have led them to not participate. The Koko experiment, though, raises further questions, in part because it was carried out as “nonhuman subjects research,” meaning that participants were deprived of a number of protections related to their safety and privacy. Any experiment like the one carried out last year would necessarily raise questions about the ethics of researching anti-suicide interventions in social media, and the role of chatbots and scripted health interventions in suicide prevention. Social media companies have been grappling for years with what to do when their users post content indicating they’re at risk of harming themselves generally, users are referred to crisis hotlines, where they can speak to people who have been trained to talk to those in distress.
The effectiveness of this unproven intervention is what researchers sought to study.
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