Amazon autocomplete recommends suicide kits to teens | Hacker News Reader

Amazon autocomplete recommends suicide kits to teens

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This sounds like an interesting case of third parties recommending sets of products that create unfortunate combinations within Amazon's own recommendation system. Twitter is an absolutely terrible format for such long form content, so here's the threadreaderapp link:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1578121305664143360.html

I think it's totally fine for Amazon to sell lab-grade chemicals regardless of whether there's a common household use for them. I've personally bought chemicals like this for use in an aquarium.

It makes absolutely no sense to blame neutral 3rd parties in someone's suicide. If Amazon's "frequently bought together" feature suggested anti-vomiting agents and a book discussing suicide techniques, that's a pretty unfortunate and I'd really like to see a screenshot proof, but doesn't change the fact that person likely had acquired all the information they needed independently. These personal injury are grifters preying on grieving families.

Their claim that "Amazon is a serial killer" is one of the most ridiculous and hyperbolic things I've read in a while.

The amount of dangerous shit I can get at Academy makes this entire argument ridiculous, so I agree with you.

See also: Darwin Award candidates with thermite, a lawnmower, and a firearm.

Alternate interpretation: family tries to shift the blame to others after pushing their kid to suicide, assisted by greedy lawyers.

The problem here isn't that dangerous chemicals are for sale. The problem is that the life of the victim was so bad that suicide felt like the better option. Banning dangerous chemicals won't fix that.

On the topic of interesting Amazon recommendations, if you shop for aluminum oxide, Amazon will helpfully bundle iron oxide and magnesium ribbon behind a single button for you. Go a bit further down and they will even sell you cardboard tubes to put the resulting mixture into.

https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Oxide-800-mesh-lb/dp/B01CVBX...

My childhood would have been a lot more convenient if Amazon was around back then. I remember having to explain to adults at stores why I wanted stuff and not having a good answer. In fact, I remember trying to buy mercury chloride to demo the halloween clock reaction and they wouldn't sell it to me, which probably worked out well because I don't think I really wanted to properly dispose of the mercury when complete.

It might appear to be a thermite kit at first glance, but this mixture won't do anything. You need metallic aluminum plus iron oxide to make thermite. A mixture of powdered aluminum oxide and iron oxide is about as inert a mixture as you can make. It will reliably snuff out burning magnesium ribbon.

It baffles me that Amazon doesn’t want to do anything about this. I guess the only thing I can do is cancel my Prime account and never order anything from them in the future.

Looking at listings for pure sodium nitrate, I don't see any of the "frequently bought together" suicide kit items they mention. When I search for "suicide" there's a "Suicide and Crisis Lifeline" banner shown:

  Call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
  You're not alone. Confidential help is available for free.

Well for one, if you search nitrate instead of nitrite you'll get different results.

When I search "sodium nitrite pure" on Amazon the first page of results all are sodium nitrate. For the actual "nitrite" listings, my points stands. There are no weird recommendations.

My son died after taking this product. He was not at our house at the time. He was 35. He was on the phone with my husband as he was gasping for air and I was on my phone trying to get him help as we listened to him die. Something that we will never forget in our lifetime

Why is Amazon to blame for this?

Is it not better, assuming a person is set on killing oneself, to give them a way out that doesn't have a relatively high chance of failing and resulting in permanent disability (firearms, overdoses, most ways of depriving oneself of oxygen)? Is it not better to have a relatively less painful method rather than one that, if it goes wrong, you slowly and painfully suffocate to death, should you be so lucky as to die before someone can "save" you and leave you with brain damage (hanging)?

I agree that suicide is inadvisable, but I don't think that this lawyer or families should be able to rent-seek because Amazon allowed people who were set on dying to die with some degree of dignity, by no intention of Amazon's.

If you look at this lawyer's timeline, you see a quote-tweet of concurrence to a sentiment literally saying, "fuck sanctioned suicide. and also fuck amazon. they’re killing our youth together."

It's not Amazon and it's not some abstract suicide that's killing people. It's people that are killing people. Themselves. And they're doing it because life is terrible and miserable and not worth living, not because they just on a whim saw that some online retailer was selling dangerous salt.

Society should solve the underlying problems that end up making life so absolutely and undeniably terrible that killing yourself looks like the more rational option, instead of lawyers using tragedy to make money off of moral outrage in the name of trying to treat the symptom. It's pathetic, disgusting and wrong.

Well sure, but that's precisely what they are doing. Solving the underlying problem is precisely recognizing that in most cases, the issue that is bothering the person trying to commit suicide can be solved by other means, and so one of the first thing to do is to prevent them from doing a suicide attempt

That's absolutely not what they're doing. If you want to fix society, stop the societal factors that create the urge. Don't try in vain to take autonomy away and force people to barbaric, unreliable, dehumanizing solutions after the urge has already overtaken them. That's cruel, ill-advised, and sick. Especially when, like in Goldberg's case, you're doing it for money.

Forcing people to a rope or a gun just serves to add "disabled" to their list of problems (or amplify their existing problems, if "lack of autonomy" is part of their reason), and then instead of them having their previous problems, they now have their previous problems plus one. At least with suicide your problems go away, because you stop existing.

> In another case, the child’s parent was riddled with guilt for obliviously leaving the unopened box containing SN on the counter.

Apart from the sheer tragedy of this -

Shouldn’t all boxes containing dangerous chemicals be marked as such, otherwise $consequences?

Looks like Amazon could do with reading call before you dig. (jwz 1998)

[1] https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/dig.html

but who will police the algobots?

jwz's links with an HN Referer header only show an image of a testicle, in case someone doesn't know.

Hmmm, well there you go, everday I learn something new.

With 20-20 hindsight Ican't say I'm surprised.

Social media and ad networks are so short-term profit driven that the algorithms recommend things to kill off the very users that they are earning money off of.

This system is broken.

Sodium nitrite is used to cure and preserve meat. That's why Amazon sell it. It is not a "suicide kit" any more than any other chemical.

From the thread:

> Amazon recommends that purchasers also buy Tagamet to avoid vomiting up the poison, a personal use scale to measure the proper quantity, and the Amazon Edition of the Peaceful Pill Handbook, a suicide manual with an entire chapter on how to die by SN.

That's definitely a suicide kit.

I think we need to be clear about our definitions and our expectations here.

To me, a suicide kit is something you find by looking for "suicide kit" AND it is a single item sold for a single purpose.

This is important because if we're not strict about that, then there are likely billions of "suicide kits" sold daily on and offline. A knife + any other item is a suicide kit by that definition. So are Caffeine pills or normal salt or wiper fluid or a wood chipper.

And that's the problem here: these are random items someone who already wanted to commit suicide might want, but might equality be sought by any reasonable sane person for safe use.

Amazon is recommending 98% pure SN, which the thread says has no use outside a lab.

From thread:

NOTE: the product we’re suing about should not be mistaken for curing salt which is only 6% pure SN and used to cure meats.

The lawyer's thread is wrong. Sodium nitrate is used in aquariums. I've purchased similar lab-grade chemicals for use in mine.

nitrIte, not nitrAte.

This was actually addressed in the article: the product used to cure meat is only 6% pure sodium nitrite. In this case, Amazon was selling a 98% pure sodium nitrite, which has no known household use

6% SN also has no household use. The thread is wrong to imply it does. Curing salt is <1% SN, so either way you need to dilute it.

So now you get the reason why a person might want to buy 98% pure SN: to have a stockpile that lasts long, just take a bit of SN and dilute it to the required concentration.

Exactly.

People (I've done it once or twice but I am not super into it) who cure their own meat get quite obsessive about their "recipes" 0.5% or 0.4% or 0.6% SN? Cloves or Nutmeg? etc.

The thread addresses this: "(NOTE: the product we’re suing about should not be mistaken for curing salt which is only 6% pure SN and used to cure meats.).

The thread seems not to know you can (and people often do) home dilute their chemicals. In fact 6% pure salt is actually very high for home curing and will also need to be diluted down to <1% to be used. 6% salt would be toxic if ingested in any real quantity too...

The whole thing seems like a lawyer trying to turn a nothing case into something and either being ignorant of the facts or hoping others are...

I'm sympathetic to the needs of home chemists, niche as they are, but it's the co-recommendations that really send it over the edge.

Is everyone just secretly a sadist? I don't understand how making it harder for people in that much pain to be freed from their suffering is moral or just.

There's a lot happening in the body and brain of a teenager. There can be a lot of anxiety and to some that can feel overwhelming. There's also a lot of peer pressure among teens. For most teenagers all that will pass even though it may not feel that way at the time.

I refer this quote from the tweet:

"Even more heartbreaking, we got several cases where the children had consumed the SN, immediately notified their loved ones that they’d ingested it and regretted it, and even though EMS reached them in time, they didn’t recognize the telltale symptoms, saw no instructions on the bottle, and had to contact poison control as the child died in front of them."

Many of the dominant religions in our world sees suicide as a sin, some going so far as to claim that the victim will be punished for it in the afterlife. This morality defines much of our lives, even if you don’t belong to a religion.

Point in case: suicide is illegal in many states in the US.

Instead of stopping to show these "recommendations", we could leverage the information that this customer intents to commit suicide. Contact authorities and get this person into therapy with professionals.

That's two birds with one stone. Amazon preserves a long-term customer AND gets to keep the extra $20 for their Q3 results!

No search query should ever result in a visit from authorities, especially for therapy or psychological evaluation. There are quite a few books that thoroughly describe why this is a bad idea. Probably available on Amazon.

This is just a result of the ruleset and can happen with any recommendation. You have to add an exception for certain keywords until there is outrage about another combination again. Because neither taste, sensibility nor any thought is part of the recommendation process.

True story: In the UK, a mate buying household cleaning supplies in bulk triggered a visit by two very polite MI5 boys. Just to check.

To me this is indicative that law enforcement either doesn't have enough to do or that they have wrong priorities.

Also they should not have access to information of what people are buying in the first place because you end up with such surprise visits. That you see terror everywhere is a known occupational hazard.

This is a horrifically dystopian suggestion. I do not need the police called to my home because I searched "suicide" on Amazon.

Oh heck, I strongly agree. I just meant it as a joke to optimize for maximum profits. :)

The general trend of authoritarian intervention around suicide is taking away their autonomy or, in some cases, police raiding their house because they're a "threat."

I'm sure that your proposal would have no adverse outcomes, though.

People should fix society instead of treating symptoms.

So any HNer who was curious and searched 'sodium nitrate' to see their personalized recommendations should get a visit from the authorities? Surely there is no way this could go wrong or be abused... The next generation of swatting would be tricking people to click on links for Amazon searches for poison or pressure cookers.

As said elsewhere, it's actually 'sodium nitrite' and searching for 'sodium nitrate' does not show the relevant suggestions. For anyone that might be curious to search it from this comment.

More specifically, sodium nitrAte [1], with an a, NaNO₃, has a rat LD50 of over 3 g/kg, has a signal word of Warning, and has no toxicity label (it has H272 and H319, an oxidizer and causes serious eye irritation). Sodium nitrIte [2], with an i, NaNO₂, has a rat LD50 of around 85 mg/kg, almost two orders of magnitude smaller, has a signal word of Danger, and has H301/acute toxicity with a skull-and-crossbones label, in addition to H272 and H319, and H400 (very toxic to aquatic life) too. The two are very different. Somewhat distressingly, searching for sodium nitrite on Amazon comes up with some sodium nitrate results, and searching sodium nitrate comes up with at least one product that is mostly (if still only 6%) sodium nitrite. I wish search engine developers would not insist on assuming any similar word is just a typo: that's a potentially very dangerous mixup.

Searching for sodium nitrite and selecting a seller of >98% on Amazon (US) did give a suicide-instruction book as a suggestion when I searched initially (logged out, private tab), but after looking up the SDSs and coming back to this, I no longer get anything of the sort.

I doubt that legitimate chemical suppliers like Fisher/VWR/Sigma-Aldrich/etc would sell sodium nitrite to a buyer without an approved account (though VWR if I recall correctly won't sell chemicals at all to residential addresses, even sodium chloride, so it's not necessarily the best comparison).

[1]: https://www.alfa.com/en/msds/?language=EE&subformat=CLP1&sku...

[2]: https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AAA186680B&p...

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