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.)
There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.
This… is DEEPLY DISTURBING.
SIGNAL. BOOST.
Holy holy shit.
This is deeply concerning.
As a licensed clinical psychologist myself (with more than a decade of professional experience post licensure) this is horrifying.
In order to become a licensed mental health practitioner, I had to attend more than 5 years of school following my undergraduate degree, I had to obtain thousands (multiple thousand) of hours of supervised practical experience, and then pass two licensing exams. I am subject to the laws pertaining to my practice in my state (in the US) and I have to take more than 30 hours of continuing education every two years. Here are some things that immediately jumped out as being unethical:
- targeted marketing. I am not allowed to approach people who are in vulnerable situations and offer my services. I can generally advertise but I cannot pick out a social media post and approach that person and tell them they could benefit from my services. Why? Because the ethics governing my practice recognize that someone who is emotionally vulnerable is vulnerable to predatory marketing.
- documentation. I am legally required to keep documentation of every interaction I have with a client-patient. I am required to maintain those documents in a confidential way. Back when we had paper files, they were kept behind two locks (locked filing cabinet in a locked office) and now that things are electronic, the electronic health records are maintained in hipaa compliant ways. I cannot release any of those documents (except in very very very rare instances) without signed consent from my client. Because the client is the owner (ultimately, this is simplifying things) of their health records. And, importantly, after services have ended and certain time has passed, I am required to destroy those documents. This service does none of that.
- my own well-being. I am expected to monitor my own well-being and to be aware of how things that impact me may impact my work. One of the reasons the pandemic was so hard on therapists? We were all in it too! It’s “easy” to provide therapy to someone going through a divorce when I’m not, it’s very hard to do so when I’m going through one myself. This is not to say that peer support doesn’t have a place in mental health but the circumstances that is recommended for are not all encompassing. Pairing people with other people going through the same thing with no other screening is deeply concerning.
I recognize that this chat bot thing clearly states that it is not a licensed mental health professional and that is exactly the worry. Look, I have my issues with licensure. It is incredibly expensive and can be prohibitively so for someone who is just starting their career. On top of the expense of grad school. I was fortunate that my family could help me. There are also other problems with it. The benefit of licensure is that if someone has an adverse experience, there is recourse. If I fuck up in any of the ways listed above? I could lose my license and my entire career.
When (not if) someone relies on this service and has an adverse outcome, what recourse is there? There is no governing body to report it to, there is no ethical code that is in place to point to a violation. I have worked with people after they have been harmed by mental health practitioners and it is an awful thing to have to witness. I do not wish that on anyone. Especially kids who are targeted by this service who doesn’t know any better. Who shouldn’t have to know any better!
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.
dating-type app but instead of matching for romance it connects writers/artists+ who don’t want to do research with autistic people with the appropriate special interest
ERASE the idea that America saved lives by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from your minds. ERASE the idea that it was anything more than a political move to scare Russia and also to satiate US curiosity as to the true ability of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military bases. They were heavily populated civilian cities chosen precisely bc the U.S. wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go. Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the U.S. literally wanted to test out their nuclear weapons on people that they deemed disposable. That is it. If those bombs were dropped by any nation other than the US veryone involved would have been tried as war criminals.
Also erase the idea that America was the hero of WWII and got into the war because they wanted so save people. They couldn’t have cared less about the victims of the Holocaust, proven by the fact that they turned away so many shiploads of refugees that went on to die at the hands of Nazis.
“the us wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go” oh really? Source your bullshit, asshole
i left out sources bc i figured most tumblr users know how to use google but ok
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56
- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:
“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380
- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441
- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:
“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71
- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:
“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source
- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:
“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here
- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:
“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source
- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:
“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145
So to recap:
A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.
Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.
Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.
on my hands and knees begging people to stop treating transphobia as this strictly gendered thing where transfems only get the Predatory Monster version and transmascs only get the Brainwashed Victim version. Putting aside the erasure of experiences beyond the transfem-transmasc binary, it doesn’t really apply even to those who fall within it.
Tranfems get treated like confused victims when convenient. Young trans girls are brainwashed by their liberal parents / forcefully feminised by the state because they touched a pink toy truck once. Straight trans women are gay men desperate to escape homophobia. Black transfems are victims of a jewish plot to destroy black masculinity.
Transmascs are treated as predators all the time. Transmasc youtubers are causing kids to mutilate themselves. Gay trans men are perverted women trying to convert real gay men into liking pussy. Straight trans men are lesbians committing rape by deception on pure, hetero women. Lesbian trans men are a danger to real lesbians. You really want this bearded man in the same bathroom as your little girl, just because he was assigned female at birth?
It’s both. It’s always been both. And the more we insist there’s a pink transphobia for the girls and a blue transphobia for the boys, the more we let this shit go unchallenged, and the more it spreads, even within our own spaces. Stop ignoring it, for fucks sake.
This probably sounds obvious, but I learned today that prisoners aren’t protected by OSHA regulations, and that this is another reason why employers are so eager to utilize this modern slavery. It’s only a couple cents an hour, less transportation costs than the overseas sweatshops, and if you want people to work with hazardous materials without proper training? That’s fine too! Prison labor is the ultimate free market solution!
If you want to really change the world, prisoner rights and prison reform is the way to go. Removing the ability of the ruling class to effectively punish the population frees everyone to challenge them in meaningful ways. Arbitrary violence and incarceration is how they keep people scared and divided. There is no crime in our society that isn’t generated by our society. Even the worst ones you can think of.
Prisoner rights are human rights. Prison abolition is mass freedom.
yakotta
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