There has been a lot of talk in recent months of the negative influence of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. At last we have a story which shows a positive side to being involved with social networks and how it can, in some instances, save your life.

Social media sometimes gets a very bad press. Certainly there have been a few examples in recent months of reasons not to use sites such as Facebook and Twitter. As well as a number of scams which need to be guarded against, there have been cases of people losing their jobs, losing jobs they hadn’t even started, and even a murder arising from a simple profile change.

However, one British teenager is alive today purely because the Facebook friend he decided to send an impromptu suicide note to had the tenacity to take it seriously. The unnamed 16-year-old boy from Oxfordshire is thought to have been depressed for a while when he suddenly decided to take his own life. He failed thanks to an American girl he was chatting to online.

According to The Times, the teenager sent a private message to the girl on Facebook at around 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday. The message implied he was about to take his own life. The girl immediately told her parents of her fears, and they in turn contacted the local state police in Maryland.

The only details the girl knew about the boy were his name and the fact he attended a school in Oxfordshire. Despite this, the distress call was passed on to the Thames Valley police force in England via a White House Special Agent and the British Embassy in Washington.

Thames Valley police used a combination of Google and the electoral roll to narrow down the search to eight possible addresses. Officers were then dispatched to each one in turn and the fourth one visited provided a result. Three hours after the message was sent across the Atlantic via Facebook, the boy was found unconscious in his bedroom after taking an overdose of prescription drugs.

The boy was rushed to hospital and has now made a full recovery. After all the negativity surrounding social media and the Web in general, especially with sites dedicated to suicide, it’s nice to hear of someone’s life being saved by the use of Facebook. Which just shows that technology isn’t evil, but some of the people who use it are.

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Entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 9:55 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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