Amazon “suicide kits” have led to teen deaths
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Second of all and most important... WHY the hell were these CHILDREN buying stuff off of Amazon, somehow WITHOUT THEIR PARENT'S KNOWLEDGE? Did they just pay with their own cc, have it delivered to the house all while their parents/guardians DIDN'T notice?
If their parents are so uncaring for their children, then I'm not even surprised they wanted to commit suicide.
Just my 2¢ and sorry for yelling a bit
Likewise, a lot of banks have changed their debit cards to VISA debit cards so they can be used like credit cards, again regardless of age.
I understand and agree that if there is something ethically or morally wrong, we as humans should do something to avoid that, absolutely.
I'm just asking to have it clarified for myself what the actual problem is here, and what possible solutions there could be.
These journalists, on the other hand, have parroted the lawsuit’s PR campaign for clicks, and in doing so, have actively, purposefully, and knowingly spread this social contagion farther than Amazon ever could through their inadvertent recommendations.
So it's possible. I'd venture to guess that store has never actually given teens advice on how to kill themselves. If they were I bet they wouldn't stay in business long.
We don't have to excuse these big tech companies for the consequences of what they do. We just don't. We can demand they don't freeze accounts and keep people's money without letting them talk to a human, we can demand they don't recommend harmful products or send counterfeit goods to people, we can demand they don't evade labor laws or local zoning laws.
We don't have to put up with this bullshit. I don't give a fuck if Amazon's recommendations engine is cost effective for them. Their business model isn't my fucking problem they need to exist in society in a healthy positive way just like everyone else or they can go out of business.
You’re so ready to make everything worse for everyone just because some two-bit journalists’ clickbait has put you into a state of panicked hysteria over nothing. Your lack of control over your own mental state should alarm you more than this story.
We live in a fucking society, with people in it. These tech giants are wrecking major parts of it. The degree to which everyone in this thread is just utterly blind to the moral and interpersonal obligations of corporations and unwilling to insist on something better is really something.
I'm sure the gun nuts will come out and correct me if I'm wrong. But I sure know the easiest way to kill myself if I find myself in the US, and it's not ordering some obscure chemicals.
Having “suicide” as a suggestion for this search shows trust and safety isn’t high enough of a priority.
I also do not believe that Amazon is headed by a cabal of cackling villains who want kids to die, because they make $2.39 every time one of them buys poison on their marketplace. Instead, I think they're a big company that has a bunch of regular people focused on a bunch of different goals, and not really paying attention to this kind of thing until it becomes an issue. Hanlon's razor, etc.
BUT, given the bad press, why wouldn't Amazon put high-purity Sodium Nitrite behind some kind of age verification? They do have that process in place already for other items. Why not override the (algorithmically-generated) "suicide bundle" with something else? I'm sure they've done that in the past, too. Why do they just not do anything, and instead allow themselves to get caught up in a lawsuit and confirm people's beliefs that they're cackling villains? Seems like an unforced error.
Which is why the comments about "well algorithms are hard" falls flat. Google has complex algorithms too, but they can still add a safety layer. People have specifically asked amazon to stop selling suicide kits, and as far as I have read amazon refused to change. The issue is not that amazon cannot fix this, but that they don't want to. Hopefully this recent bad press will lead them to change their tune, but it is worrying when they can't see the best course of action without bad press.
> Amazon says that searches for the word “suicide” present customers with a banner at the top of their search results with the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
It’s literally a suicide kit, and it’s appalling that they would sell it to anyone let alone teens.
The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this.
The reason being, that people make mistakes in the course of 5 seconds, that they regret.
So, instead of that, we should be pretty sure before allowing people to make such permanent decision.
Such as, for example, by having a doctor talk to the person.
This is why the OP mentioned the TV show Futurama.
Because in the comedy TV show, people could decide in 5 seconds to do that.
And the reason why it was in a comedy TV show, is because that is bad, and absurd, and that's why it is funny.
Is it a right or not?
> we should be pretty sure
In what sense is it a right if someone else has to agree to it?
Really?
Or are you just hyper focusing on an irrelevant dictionary definition of the single word "right", that nobody else was using?
That is why I said you were being obtuse.
You focusing on a single word is missing the point, and I don't know why you would focus on the word like that.
Yeah really. What right should I have to tell them to do something or not do something with their own body and life?
Because, if you had ever spoken to anyone who has felt suicidal, you will see that most of them admit that they have had couple second lapses in judgement and are extremely glad that they did not have a 5 second suicide button that they could press.
So, me, being someone who actually cares about these people, and who has spoken to them, know that most people who are suicidal do not want to be given this option.
You would know this if you had ever spoken to someone in your life, ever, who has had depressive or suicidal thoughts.
Actually I'm a trustee of a registered charity that provides support to people with a wide range of serious welfare and mental health issues and have dealt with them in practice multiple times, providing a great deal of support from my own personal time to people struggling.
I'm sorry that you made an incorrect assumption. I'm afraid that I find it's pretty typical among people who think they should have a right to control others.
Do you have any friends who have attempted suicide, failed, and now regret the attempt immensely?
Do you wish they had succeeded in their suicide attempt?
I am talking about a situation where they regret the decision, are alive now, and are glad that they are alive, and that the attempt failed.
For that situation, do you think they should have died, even though now they admit that it was a mistake and are glad that they didn't go through with it?
> I have been for the last 15 years
This wasn't about a situation where someone has made a decision, and been certain of it for years.
Instead, if you read the conversation, it was about if someone should be able to make a quick, decision, within literally 5 seconds.
Do you understand how giving someone a decision, in this short a period of time, is extremely different than if someone has thought about the situation for a long time, and is very certain?
As the other person said, stop being obtuse.
People should have a right to be as selfish as they want with their own bodies. You don't owe anyone else a responsibility to live.
Suicide is a serious decision with serious consequences. It should be treated as such, not as some flimsy debate topic about bodily autonomy.
Have some empathy and tact when discussing such serious topics.
I get that you don't agree with me. But having a different opinion doesn't make me obtuse. That's just slinging around an insult.
You choosing to ignore it all is, plain and simple, obtuse. Period. If you don't want to be called obtuse, don't be obtuse.
Good day, then. Talking to you is clearly useless.
The vast majority of people who attempt suicide actually regret it afterwards, and have no deep desire to die. Making it hard to actually kill yourself is an extremely important safety net for these people, who outnumber the terminally ill who actually wish to die by a large margin.
Not to mention, people can be compelled to attempt suicide by social pressure, either in bullying or by family members who view them as a burden. Having to go through a neutral third party who can help make sure you actually deeply desire this step is critical to protect you from others.
Seems like that would fall under basic bodily autonomy. Why should a doctor gatekeep something so important...
This is a case where rigidly-based reasoning about rights fails the common-sense test.
Chances are on HN you'll find people sufficiently detached from reality to advocate for this.
Btw: we should not encourage suicide. I think we need to help people that are in a position where they are considering and also there are things that are deeply f'ed with our society to begin with that slowly push people to this (ie helping suicidal people is a drop in the bucket if we don't fix fundamental issues)
If it's because of the reco: how do we ensure that we ban all other possible lethal combos? Disable recommendations? Ban certain things?
AFAIK, in the US, suicide is not a crime. Assisting in another person's suicide is a crime in most states.
As the post you're replying to said, we could allow physicians to offer painless and dignified deaths after the patient proves they are of sound mind or will never recover from a horrible condition. Much like the courts recognize there can be reasonable limits to purchasing and possessing guns. Admittedly, I don't know what fraction of those who commit suicide do so because of a temporary mental state they could recover from with help, but I'm guessing it's the majority. If so, it'd be inhumane to remove basic barriers that might save people, even if it'd make it easier for the smaller group of people who "rightly" believe they would rather die.
This is a complex topic that touches on so many sore spots in society. But that's when I most doubt all-or-nothing stances. They tend to come from strong emotions rather than reason.
We are hypothesing that people don't want to actually do it and that we are doing the a service from preventing it. This could be the case - but how many people decide to end their life on a whim?
Re: recovering with help. That was one of the main things i had in mind. If the factors that lead you to suicide and/or drive you insane are not removed do you actually believe that stopping you from the final act is going to be effective? As a society we don't give 2 shits about people that are struggling. Money is our religion everything else is secondary :(
Secondly, in many studies of attempted suicides, the vast majority of people of people who survived one suicide attempt did not try again (even though the risk of further attempts is much higher with an initial attempt than in the general population, it is still quite low - around 13% in one 35-year long follow-up study).
This doesn't even count the huge number of people that have suicidal thoughts and don't actually attempt suicide - at least sometimes because of barriers like those mentioned before, which prevent a suicidal thought from turning into a rash decision like jumping in from the of the train or off the building.
In fact, for many people, this type of "near-miss" offered by such barriers is exactly what allows them to realize they need urgent help: they don't want to die, but had been ignoring similar thoughts as meer fancies, until such a moment when they realize that they would have actually done and may try again if they don't seek immediate help.
My bigger point was that nobody decides to kill themselves for fun and what needs to happen is systematically helping people not knee jerk reactions like banning X or Y. I may be wrong
This is how you end up with acetaminophen banned from gas station convenience stores and locked up behind the pharmacy counter. Or, for that matter, prohibition of alcohol, undoubtedly the most popular way to slowly kill yourself.
Try speaking to someone who has experienced suicidal ideation and how afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity.
That's certainly not a universal experience. There are rational and valid reasons a mentally ill person may want to die and other people should not deny them that right. It's inhumane torture and a complete disrespect of their personhood to disregard deny their capacity to so reason and force them to live in suffering.
If you actually want to help someone suffering from this, you must check that their desire to die persists for a long enough time, and is not simply a psychotic episode that they would regret later. This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later.
It is also extremely well established fact that the vast majority of people whose suicide attempts are thwarted are thankful for it, and that cutting access to the easiest suicide methods drastically reduces the total rate of suicides: most people who commit suicide don't want to die, they are just having an irrational episode.
Good luck backing that one up.
> This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later.
I this is a terrible criterion because even if you've made the right decision death is still incredibly scary and so is dying (which can go wrong, especially when efficient methods are witheld.)
Your overall point sounds good superficially but I don't see why you think its within your rights to be a gatekeeper for me though. It's none of your business, __at all__. You can want to help all you want, but forcing your "help" on others isn't within your rights.
> Good luck backing that one up.
Here[0] is a study that followed 98 people for 35 years after an original attempt at suicide, and found that 13% of them eventually died by suicide, some up to 15 years later. I would say that clearly shows that the vast majority of people who attempted suicide (87%) did not intend to die.
> Your overall point sounds good superficially but I don't see why you think its within your rights to be a gatekeeper for me though. It's none of your business, __at all__. You can want to help all you want, but forcing your "help" on others isn't within your rights.
You're again missing a fundamental aspect of mental illness: that many people who have a mental witness need an advocate to help keep them safe from themselves. Not just for suicide, but also self harm, extreme risk-taking behavior, substance abuse and others. You don't just let late stage Alzheimer's patients wander outside: even though freedom of movement is a fundamental human right, they don't know where and why they are going and can easily harm themselves in the process.
[0] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1...
I have a young child who has voiced suicidal thoughts and and it’s so fucking hard. The pandemic has been really rough on a lot of kids.
Thank god we are we’re finally able to get professional help (after almost a year of waiting for an available therapist).
You don’t know shit about the circumstances of these families, and jumping to the conclusion that the parents are at fault and not at least considering that a $1T company could lift a finger is kinda messed up.
Sorry for the angry tone but I’m seeing a few folks make comments like yours and it’s infuriating. This isn’t some joke topic and the Silicon Valley contrarian attitude really is frustrating to see on this thread.
I feel for the parents’ grief. I also understand how difficult parenting a troubled teenager must be.
I also categorically reject the idea that Amazon is culpable, and I think that these particular parents, in their grief, are merely attempting to externalize their feelings of guilt.
They want to rage at something or someone other than themselves.
And I *AM* parenting my children when I insist on this. The only thing I’m thinking about is if my kid goes to a dark place again and starts searching the internet.
But please: why don’t you tell me how to be better parent to prevent this?
I’m not going to do that, just like you shouldn’t be trying to force the rest of us to pay the steep costs of assuaging your parenting fears.
Saying that Amazon is not culpable is like saying Amazon would not be culpable in an overdose death if they were selling heroin to children in withdrawal, because the parents should have been more careful. Sure, they should have, they can't discharge the blame. But the source of the substance is also culpable.
I’m not going to say it’s the parent’s fault, but they’re a hell of a lot more culpable than Amazon, which isn’t any more culpable than a hardware store selling rope.
~~~
The circumstances surrounding Amazon’s sales to both Kristine and Ethan were highly irregular. Amazon has a policy that people under the age of 18 can only use the service with the involvement of a parent or guardian. However, Kristine, at just sixteen, had created her own account to purchase the poisonous chemical and was never asked her age when she set up the account. The package delivered to Kristine’s home was addressed without a last name. It read only “Kristine.”
Seventeen-year-old Ethan used the account that belonged to his mother, Nikki, to purchase Sodium Nitrite. When Nikki received the email receipt for the purchase, she immediately called Amazon’s customer service to tell them there must have been some mistake and that nobody at her home had ordered the item. Amazon told Nikki the order was cancelled. Instead, the Sodium Nitrite was delivered to her home four days later.
Everything is poisonous in excess. These are scare-words written by a lawyer looking for a big payout.
> … and was never asked her age when she set up the account.
She had to supply a credit card and agree to the terms of service.
Do you want Amazon to engage in privacy intrusive age verification? Maybe we should be forced to upload government ID?
Or maybe you should be responsible for parenting your own children, and not trying to parent the rest of us.
> The package delivered to Kristine’s home was addressed without a last name. It read only “Kristine.”
So?
> Instead, the Sodium Nitrite was delivered to her home four days later.
Yeah, that happens.
Guess what’s going to happen even more now?
All the irresponsible journalists driving social media panic are advertising sodium nitrate as an effective method of suicide to the world. People who never had heard of it or considered it are going to, now.
Parents are absolutely to blame here, our educational system is tito blame here. Our values and society in general have to be blamed here.
Stop defending actions because it's somewhat tangentially related to something else you think should be allowed.
Just how much profit are they making from these kits? Must be negligible to them? I don’t understand why they think it is worth fighting this? Or is it their policy to always fight, never back down, never say sorry etc? I honestly don’t understand. Even ignoring ethics and looking at it from only economics, it doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?
If we can hold companies liable for what their employees recommend, I don't know why we wouldn't also hold them liable for what their recommendation engines recommend.
Ah, la petit mort, c’est bon!
To me, its shows the limitations of 'AI' in 2022. We keep calling software 'intelligent' and saying things like 'we don't know exactly how it works', we tell people that it is going to take their jobs - that all seems like hubris to me. Situations like this prove that AI is not intelligent at all and has a long way to go before it is anything like intelligent.
This "kind" of harm seems to hide a huge amount of complexity. Let's assume the algorithm starts off on day 1 just looking for purchases that tend to appear in clusters. There's a potentially unbounded number of clusters that could be regarded as harmful. The options are surely:
1. Be vigilant and special case items one by one. I presume they are doing this. Maybe they aren't putting enough resources behind it or not reacting quickly enough but even if they were then things would always slip through.
2. Never use any kind of bundling algorithm ever.
(1) is a forever ongoing task so it doesn't sound like you're referring to that as that's not something where you can "iron out the kinks".
However it also doesn't sound like you mean (2) as you seem to be saying there's a way to fix this once and for all.
Is there a third option I haven't thought of?
EDIT - I guess maybe all "bundles" could require human curation before they are allowed to be displayed. It would be a gargantuan task but it's a valid third option.
This story is so much worse than the headline suggests, despite that seeming impossible.
If they artificially limit their "AI" from outside pressure, then they will have admitted that they can do it, and they'll get pressured to do it more and more. They don't want to deal with that, and would rather wait until a law is passed "forcing" them to do so - coincidentally Amazon will be best positioned to comply with that law and for some reason it'll only ever be used to go after smaller competitors.
They are obviously afraid of a precedent of having to answer for what they sell on their site and what happens next.
It’s understandable but no less sociopathic once understood.
Amazon is a $1T company. They have the resources. This is willful negligence.
They can still figure out how to buy the items separately, and Amazon isn’t inducing suicidal ideation.
Perhaps your kids shouldn’t have unrestricted and unmonitored access to order things from Amazon? Start there, instead of insisting that Amazon do the parenting for you.
Indeed. And we intend to exercise that responsibility to safeguard our children by stopping Amazon from mixing suicide kits in with shipments of innocuous household goods.
I think we disagree on the definition of “responsibility”.
So the people who have legitimate use for those chemicals can jump through a few hoops to get them.
And Amazon, a trillion dollar company, can do a better job with its algorithms and stop recommending them and selling them to teenagers.
I am super comfortable inflicting those costs on the world.
It sounds like we won’t agree on ethical fundamentals, much less this topic, so I wish you well, and hope you can source enough bubblewrap to feel safe existing in the world.
By the way your car is not a death-trap because of us nagging the industry to do better. You are welcome!
For evidence refer to the fact that your family hasn’t died of botulism or a falling building facade.
This is pretty basic stuff. It’s not a social media panic attack it’s an active lawsuit backed by sworn statements and evidence, and the fact pattern is genuinely apalling. I get skepticism at the headline but read through the details.
It's not about parents having oversight over kids. It's about mental illness: "kits" like this shouldn't exist at all for kids or otherwise. You use it once and you're dead because that's the whole point of the combination of goods. We as a society should be past the point where we need to discuss whether selling a literal suicide kit is okay or not. It's not, and we know from research that making suicide more accessible and convenient leads to more suicide. The only outcome of allowing Amazon to do what it's doing is additional deaths that could have been prevented.
It seems to me that companies massively underestimate (or willingly don’t compensate for) the importance of this newly introduced work, only cashing in on the savings from the work removed. Other examples of similar behavior include automatic moderation, which also massively fails to remove actual dangerous content.
This kind of behavior looks like greed to me, but I guess it’s legal, and needs more regulation.
This is the correct way to handle it. It being a "gargantuan task" doesn't matter. Everybody would freak out if the local supermarket advertised this kind of product but somehow "tech" (read: online retailers) can get away with this because they are big?
Amazon posts billions in profits, it can certainly afford to control their algorithms. If it's impossible, then stop using algorithms and use human curation like literally every brick and mortar business.
Amazon’s recommendations are mostly crap anyways, even for mundane, straightforward stuff. They shouldn’t be recommending anything dangerous
In fact in the UK I'm not seeing any results that could be described as a "suicide kit".
The US site does seem to stock chemicals but from a quick skim I don't seem to get any sodium nitrate in the results.
> They had decades to iron out these kinks.
Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent?
This seems similar to the content moderation problems the social media giants are having.
The sheer volume of products in Amazon’s marketplace is such that these kinds of things seem bound to happen when applying recommendation engines.
This is not to imply that such recommendations are acceptable, but my primarily contention is that this doesn’t seem like a problem that has been well solved anywhere yet.
No. Unexpected outcomes are pretty normal for search engines (and really, any complex computer system) since... forever, and really, the solution, regardless of input is is really easy: on input if (keyword in prohibited_phrases) disable recommendations, and on output if (keyword in recommendation_results) disable recommendations to user. I do believe this was solved sometime prior to E. F. Codd's 1970 "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages".
Cutting off a search early is easy. Deciding that “even though these are commonly purchased together, this pairing shouldn’t be shown” seems like a fundamentally different problem.
The thing I was replying to was the sentiment that this should have been solved decades ago.
Curation/moderation is never solved, only managed.
I think it’s because the other is mixed with salt (Prague Powder #1). You aren’t buying sodium nitrite though - you are buying prague powder.
It’s packaged that way specifically.
Maybe, but as long ago as at age 12 I was buying it from the local pharmacy to make awesome smoke bombs.
>> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this, nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm
You realize the #1 founding reason of the internet outside of sharing academic research was to distribute an entire "book" capable of this type of harm?
Purity here doesn't mean the rest is impurities, it means the percent of what you're buying is that compound. The rest is usually common salt, in this case.
The reason it's done like this is so mixing up a teaspoon and a tablespoon isn't a lethal difference.
The LD_lo of sodium nitrite is a bit over 5g for a 75kg person. You use an ounce of 6% sodium nitrite to cure about 25kg of meat. That's about 28g, or 1.7g of pure sodium nitrite. The equivalent lethal dose of what Amazon is selling is equal to ~three ounces of the stuff you use for food (enough for 75kg of meat), which ends up looking like a teaspoon at 99% purity. Do you have the confidence to correctly use a compound to cure meat where (for household use) curing 5kg requires so little chemical that you'd need to pinch it onto a scale?
While I buy 100% sucrose in 10lb quantities, the cupcakes I make with it are a small fraction sugar. It would be very difficult to guage my recipes if the concentration of sugar I bought varied per bag. Sucrose is explosive if atomized and ignited or mixed with oxidizing agents.
The same is true of salt (deadly at 3g/kg body mass and sold in 5-10lb quantities, by the way), which is important when I mix up a dry rub or table seasoning.
Why did you speak universally for something you have copious evidence to dispute?
The US government sets the purity for sodium nitrite for use in food. You can't buy food-grade sodium nitrite at other concentrations. And using too much sucrose or salt in your recipe doesn't make your cupcakes lethal.
Comparing salt to the toxicity of sodium nitrite is an absolutely bonkers argument. You'd need about 225g of salt (about 3/4 cup) to be lethal for a 75kg person. Good luck eating that much salt. By comparison, you need 5g of sodium nitrite.
Did you actually think about this for more than a second. Despite all this moral panic bullshit I would wager the majority of minors purchasing sodium nitrite are doing so for its legitimate uses. Teenagers with cooking or aquarium hobbies are not that rare - sodium nitrite suicides seem to have been in the single to low double digits for most countries - which when they report 150 to 200 percent increases over the year sounds all the more sensational.
This is stupid. Might as well ban ropes.
Some of you might want to look up the stats on intentional and unintentional Tylenol toxicity and number of deaths - it is 1000s and 100s more respectively.
It will recommend them. This is not new and there are plenty examples.
Maybe their recommendation system was aggregating. Or maybe it was just suggesting specific things the user had viewed or purchased recently.
I’ll withhold judgement until less charged “facts” are out in the open.
For a forum that so often likes to cite Gell Man amnesia - how about fucking now?
Since these suicides are planned, it doesn't seem like needing to buy the products individually presents much of a safeguard.
The category of things that "might be harmful to minors" is impossibly broad. I suspect Amazon will be removing this chemical from their listings, just as Amazon and eBay constantly add new items to their banned items list. There are several chemicals that I ordered from Amazon in the past that now can't be found online, and I expect it's only a matter of time until pure sodium nitrite also disappears.
The bigger question is: Should we be forcing every online marketplace to perform strict age verification of every customer? From the article:
> Kristine was able to create an Amazon account even though she was under 18, skirting Amazon rules against underage account holders—the lawsuit notes that Amazon does not verify age.
If a minor can get ahold of a credit card, it's not hard to imagine that they can also get ahold of their parent's drivers license to go through an arbitrary age verification too.
Even if they did perform age verification on accounts, how would you expect Amazon to verify that the person pressing the Checkout button is actually the parent, and not a minor who sat down at their parents' computer and went to Amazon.com?
It's really easy to make blanket dismissals of difficult situations in comments ("Amazon shouldn't be selling X to minors...") but the reality is that the only way to prevent these things is to remove them entirely from the marketplace. Amazon does remove a lot of potentially misused medications and chemicals from their marketplace, but the list is never going to perfectly capture every single combination of items that might trend as being harmful.
What would you propose as a practical solution? A blanket ban on anything that might be harmful?
We don’t?
Then please explain how I have a bottle of 30% H2O2 sitting on my paints & solvents shelf in the garage. I bought it at my local farm & feed shop. No ID, licence, or even proof of farm ownership required.
Shit is scary af, but I gotta say it does on hell of a job at cleaning mold and mildew out of my window frames.
Why not?
Why should I be inconvenienced because a rounding-error’s worth of people made the choice, of their own free will, to misuse a product to harm themselves?
This didn’t happen accidentally. It’s not some kind of attractive nuisance.
I guess I’m not surprised that if self-obsessed people lacking nuance and empathy grow in number everywhere that they are also present on HN. Just look at the wording. I’ve noticed them more frequently as of late, in threads regarding war, death and suffering.
Furthermore, to claim a severely depressed teenager is a fully-formed person doing something “of their own free will” betrays fundamental ignorance regarding what depression is, as well as how teenagers function.
There was also a quickly deleted response accusing me of ”pathological empathy that would abandon any principled position if it offered an immediate salve” to my “emotional panic”.
I believe this reveals more about the character and expectations of the commenter than anything else. To their credit, they deleted it.
Rational discourse about touchy subjects appears to be largely impossible. I expected better from HN. It doesn‘t follow that because you apparently hold an absolutist stance regarding what you consider freedom to be, that I am on the opposite end of this absolutism.
Society should not bear the cost or responsibility for parenting other people’s children and preventing all possible accidents, much less willful self-harm.
The possibility of bad things happening is the cost of having a healthy, responsible, capable society of well-adjusted adults.
Next you’ll be advocating for age checks on kitchen knife purchases out of an irrational fear of “knife crime”: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives
Don’t worry, though, Scotland is a little more relaxed: “In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives.”
I moved out at sixteen and bought my first kitchen knife set. That’d be illegal now in the UK.
That’s where your emotionally-driven policies lead. No thanks.
[1] 85, https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/McCar...
This type of lawsuit/logic/reporting is an absolute field day, you just have to come up with the clickbait "[frequently purchased together items] kit promoted TO CHILDREN."
A child is their parents'/caretakers' responsibility. I shouldn't have to give away my freedoms just because of some negligent parents.
https://gizmodo.com/buckyballs-magnets-have-been-banned-by-t...
Also even the ban on the toy has been overturned: https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a24110/buckyballs-l...
As stated in other comments, this is a concentration that's not used for anything else. The food preservative is a different concentration.
A better analogy would be to ban ropes that are pre-tied into noises and cannot be untied, so they can only be used for hanging. Yep, I agree, those should be banned too.
Also I disagree that the concentration is not used for anything else.
The issue here is ease of access and direction (the instructions on how to do it), not the fact that these things exist.
It's like hydrogen peroxide. You can go to a chemical supplier and buy high concentration stuff that will eat your arm off. They don't sell that at the grocery store, because it'd be dangerous. The high concentration stuff is still available to those who need it, but it's not so easy to get and readily available that it causes preventable deaths.
They sell dry ice, and that’ll give you frostbite in seconds if you’re stupid.
They sell extra-strength Tylenol, and that’ll destroy your liver if you just take 10-20 of them.
They don’t sell concentrated hydrogen peroxide at the grocery store because nobody is asking and there’s not a market for it — not because it’s dangerous.
The maximum commercially available (sodium hypochlorite) bleach concentration is about 15%, and that’s due to its non-linear rate of decomposition and extremely short shelf-life at higher concentrations.
A 15% solution must be used very soon after manufacture and does not have significant non-industrial uses — that’s why it’s not stocked in grocery stores. It has nothing to do with its safety at that concentration.
100% bleach would be anhydrous sodium hypochlorite, which is highly unstable and can decompose explosively.
Nobody stocks that.
I'm so tired of kneejerk reactions that X is involved in some tragic events so we should ban them, as opposed to looking deeper into the real reasons things are happening. It's much easier to blame Amazon (who I do not have positive feelings about) for selling sodium nitrate than it is to deal with the socioeconomic and environmental circumstances leading to someone wanting to kill themselves. Pills and purchasing restrictions have become the "let them eat cake" of the 21st century.
I'm unable to reproduce this in the US (using the Amazon app); my autosuggestions (after typing "sodium nitrite "):
powder
pure
curing salt
kit
food grade
99
nano2
liquid
powder pure
food grade powder
These things weren’t problems until the modern era, and are concentrated in White and East Asian populations.
Interestingly, some people are arguing that mass shootings are a form of suicide, and that these epidemics are linked.
The story is claiming that Amazon is in the wrong primarily for promoting these products on their site. CBS running a story on this, and basically telling the world "Hey, you can buy suicide kits on Amazon", is essentially as bad, if not worse (because they're publicizing it as opposed to just recommending books to people already looking at the product). It's possible a CBS segment could cause more deaths than anything Amazon is doing depending on who watches it. I'd imagine someone at CBS was smart enough to realize this and cancelled the segment.
If you look at the tweet thread this is precisely the reason CBS provided: https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1578123102256513025
It’s astounding how many odd chemicals you can buy online without a reason for using them.
If I did, and was intent on buying this to commit suicide, how long would it take for me to read the extra sentence on the site that told me about sodium nitrite in the first place that would now additionally advise me to say that I was buying it for (acceptable to others) reason X?
I'm not an Amazon apologist. But if someone is adding a book on how to commit suicide to their cart then my first worry is not going to be what an online vendor suggests to bundle with that.
> “knowingly assisting in the deaths of healthy children by selling them suicide kits.”
I think it shows a wild conception of health if we think someone buying a book on how to commit suicide and tools to go with it is healthy
Seems like at the crux of this lawsuit, isn't that Amazon is selling products they're legally allowed to sell, it is that Amazon is also selling a booklet with information that is readily available online telling people how to use that product in unintended (deadly) ways.
HN hates Amazon, HN also hates censorship, the question is which do we as a community hate more? Should a company be liable for the free access of information? There's even some people in the comments already calling for new age restrictions on Amazon accounts for certain products, I wonder how long once that is implemented before certain localities pass laws restricting access to "unpure" materials like sex ed/safe sex?
I won't even address the "suicide kit" claim since that is simply sensationalist reporting. Ironically I think if this lawsuit is successful on its merit, you could also sue arstechnica for promoting the same thing they're accusing Amazon of. That's the nature of censorship, nobody is really safe once you open those floodgates.
I think internet contrarianism has warped everyone’s brains into an unrecognizable state.
The fact that Amazon is defending this behavior instead of saying oh shit we fucked up and dedicating a fraction of a basis point of a days profit to fixing it is apalling. The fact that HN readers are doing the same is incomprehensible.
As a society we can stop companies from mixing chemicals that kill teenagers in minutes and instructions on how to do just that with standard household purchases.
We can put safeguards around sales of chemicals like that and our societal ability to preserve self-expression will be fine when we do.
Amazon sells millions of products that could, in fact, kill children. Just go to:
Health & Household > Health Care > OTC Medications & Treatments
That clearly isn't the issue at the center of this lawsuit, since if it were there are far lower hanging fruit.
> The fact that Amazon is defending this behavior instead of saying oh shit we fucked up and dedicating a fraction of a basis point of a days profit to fixing it is apalling.
Because once you do that it only emboldens additional lawsuits and calls for censorship. In effect Amazon would be admitting all future liability, every product that could kill a child (which, as I said, is millions) they're now liable for.
> As a society we can stop [..] instructions on how to do just that
You start with "this isn't censorship, this is access to chemicals" but end with "why can't we as a society censor this type of information?"
We use those tools of analysis decide that selling suicide kits as described in the article, even after learning of the consequences, is fucking insane and indefensible.
We do that because we are rational members of society instead of autonomous algorithmic message board argument bots (or attorneys) who have developed a sociopathic disregard for the well being of others and basic common sense.
Tylenol overdoses both intentional and unintentional dwarf this sodium nitrite nonsense scare bullshit by 1000s.
I haven't seen anyone suggesting that Amazon ban teens from buying the book, just the dangerous chemicals. And calling that "censorship" seems silly. Is it also censorship that kids aren't allowed to own guns, or that you're not allowed to own plutonium?
> I won't even address the "suicide kit" claim since that is simply sensationalist reporting.
What else would you call a bundle of items consisting of a book with instructions on a way to commit suicide, plus all of the materials needed to do so?
Thus proposing a new system of age restrictions, which can be re-used for other things once they exist.
> And calling that "censorship" seems silly.
The lawsuit is asking Amazon to stop sharing information, or associating that information in particular ways, that is in fact censorship.
> What else would you call a bundle of items consisting of a book with instructions on a way to commit suicide, plus all of the materials needed to do so?
I'd call it an automated "Frequently purchased together" recommendation.
And society is obligated to not work against our societal norms. Amazon will lose this case and will make the necessary changes.
Amazon continuously demonstrates a dirt bag mentality. Few employees last more than 6 months and they have such a bad reputation. And the more we know about there shady ways… the worse it gets.
Because society values family and children more than ‘censorship concerns’.
I believe the case is specifically focusing on the promotion of the kits to underage children. As a society we have already embraced censorship for children.
If we can count how on Amazon to not offer up R rated movies to children via Amazon Prime (which they dutifully do), it seems reasonable that we should expect (and sadly now demand) that they not promote combinations of products to children that are designed to lead to their death.
Even if we start a lost of possible harmful items, would it solve the issue in this case? How are minors buying anything in the interent without supervision? Were they even using an account marked as a minor?
Yes, it’s their algorithm. But they tweak it all the time to catch issues like this.
If they recommended Mein Kampf and white robes when you ordered rope, surely we’d all agree that would be wrong, even though those individual items are defendable. Recommending them in combination would be evil.
Likewise, recommending guns and bullets alongside a book about mass shootings would be evil.
I don’t see how this is a controversial position.
The real question shouldn't be around the algorithm, but rather around the suicide book being banned. Or even around unauthorized account creation/access or payment.
The algorithm is not evil, and Amazon itself is not either, provided they do something to try to fix the problem. But the problem is in how algorithms themselves operate.
It's just taking known info and applying it to current situation.
The only actual, proper, and relatively easy by comparison solution to all of this is to just make it so people have no want or reason to commit suicide, or any other 'evil' acts that might be suggested by a foolish algorithm.
Banning things has never worked. Just look at all those super successful wars on drugs, alcohol, etc. Never, worked. Ever.
The true evil, in my opinion, is the attempt to kid-safe the world to the point where it removes all potential for joy and happiness. That leads to suicide by the first groups who commit it, which produces data for our A.I driven machines, which leads to algorithms happily suggesting the perfect thing for it.
I would like to add finally, that just because you don't see how your or any one elses opinion is or is not controversial, does not make it so. Calling opinion controversial based upon opinion itself as well, is just argumentation. Which should be fine in a logical world. But we do not live in a logical world, which is why people are preferring to opt-out of it.
And that's my opinion on the matter. Algorithms just happily oblige the user.
If your values diverge from that great for you I guess but I think my values on this are more consistent with a healthy society and approach to regulating corporate behavior.
When Amazon has had to do this 1000+ unique times, then we can have the debate of whether their extra work is worth the lost lives of kids. Probably still a loser of an argument IMO but let’s just take a simple first step yeah?
But maybe it's fitting we are like that, because at the end of the day, who's right is it to be banning anything? Certainly not yours, or mine. Sure, protect the children... but against what? Themselves? Kids have been doing stupid things for a long time, and been mostly fine. It's only recently that society has decided to ban joy as well by happenstance via the many methods employed to reduce the spread of covid that things started to go overboard.
How about we just stop making life shitty for people. That will be what makes this entire discussion moot.
"How about we just stop making life shitty for people."
Easier said than done. Most of the child suicides are so well off families.
Sure, but nothing in life worth doing is easy. Sometimes you have to take the hard path to gain anything worthwhile.
And quite frankly, there is no reason or excuse for society to continue to be made shittier and shittier just to suit the inadequate opinions of literally anyone.
Throwing up small obstacles to suicide has been done forever and isn’t controversial. People are impulsive. We put up railings and hotline phones on bridges and stuff like that.
That’s a good thing.
This is controversial; people fought against adding ugly suicide netting to the Golden Gate Bridge for years, and there are strong utilitarianism-based arguments for limiting the lengths we go to prevent suicide.
There’s no cost benefit analysis to do here for the rest of us. There’s no pros and cons. Amazon doing this is bad, they were told about it and didn’t fix it. They have godlike amounts of money and are telling us to go fuck ourselves if it bothers us.
They could make an algorithm that doesn’t literally recommend suicide to teens and they should. There’s no other side of the argument we are talking about a recommendation here. The recommendation engine is a consumer product and it’s faulty.
As for the chemical the legitimate needs for it are likely vanishingly small and I find it really unlikely the people that need it would really mind some age verification or another extra safety step when ordering it.
We have been so corrupted by corporate influence we don’t even think to insist that companies act in the benefit of society anymore. Making profits isn’t a god given right if the product is bad for people.
Well, you just articulated one of the major social benefits. We do really mind. The benefits are clearly not zero, like you claimed.
What you didn’t articulate is an argument for why we should invest so much — and give up privacy and our freedoms — to try (and fail) to prevent such a vanishingly small number of self-inflicted deaths.
This is emotional outrage bait, not a basis for instituting evidence-based policy.
Frankly, it’s not our problem, and not our cost to be bourne.
If you want to take away anyone’s ability to use the internet for commerce without interference, why don’t you you start with taking away your own children’s free access to the internet and credit cards, rather than everyone else?
You can do that yourself, today — and probably should.
If this is really your approach to consumer product safety then I suppose you’re consistent, if wrong.
I bet it’s not though. I suspect you’re pretty happy with the outcome of a framework where dangerous products are regulated.
The freedom argument is specious we don’t regulate commerce with corporate freedom as an overriding value. We mandate everything from child proof packaging to rear view mirrors to alcohol consumption of pilots to competence exams for barbers to labeling for Doritos.
I suspect most in this thread are idly arguing from bias rather than reading the facts of Amazon’s behavior here it’s pretty indefensible.
Our tech giants are corporations and the things they produce are products. By a few historical accidents (especially section 230) and a shit ton of corporate PR we have been conditioned not to evaluate them as consumer products that can be defective and harmful but we should start.
Yes, I do. You do too. Your medicine cabinet and cleaning supplies are full of lethal “lab chemicals” that would kill if ingested, or ingested in even mild excess.
But this isn’t even a “highly lethal lab chemical”, it’s just sodium nitrate; mined straight from the earth, and has been used as a food preservative for at least a couple centuries.
> … you use to restock your kitchen
It’s none of your business what we buy these things for, whether it’s to stock our kitchen for meat preservation, or backyard science experiments with our kids.
> The freedom argument is specious we don’t regulate commerce with corporate freedom as an overriding value.
The freedom you’re attacking out of emotional panic isn’t Amazon’s. They can comply with whatever arbitrary nonsensical “save the children” crap you invent, and compliance will cost a microscopic percentage of their overall revenue.
The freedom you’re attacking is mine, and everyone else’s.
Take responsibility for yourself and your own children. If you can’t do that, blame yourself, not me.
Do you also want to be free to buy baby formula and not be sure what’s in it, or a car where the seatbelts fail if you weigh over 150lbs? Do you want freedom to see pornographic billboards near the playground?
These things aren’t freedom by any recognizable definition. They’re just defective products made by unaccountable corporations. Like Amazon’s recommendation engine in this case.
The idea that corporations should just be able to do whatever they want is so fucking toxic. Seeing this attitude pervasive here on the discussion board of the private equity firm that’s advised so much of our modern tech culture sure does explain a lot though.
I want to be free to order goods without having to upload government-issued ID or otherwise jump through hoops to assuage your panic.
I also want to be free to see a suicide book next to a sodium nitrate purchase without an emotionally panicked busy-body deciding that we have to save the children by infringing on the latter freedom.
> Do you also want to be free to buy baby formula and not be sure what’s in it, or a car where the seatbelts fail if you weigh over 150lbs? Do you want freedom to see pornographic billboards near the playground?
You’re conflating a lot of very different issues here. Can you actually explain how these are related?
> The idea that corporations should just be able to do whatever they want is so fucking toxic.
Nobody is advocating that here, that I can tell.
Furthermore, far more toxicity arises out of nanny-scolds advocating for ever-increasing regulation so that nobody will ever feel unsafe again.
If you want to look for the source of policies that stifle children, replace their healthy childhood experiences with institutionalized suffocation, and as a result, have created the most mentally unwell generation (literally) ever — try a mirror.
Razor blades, pen knives, #8 marine line, paracord. All of these things are trivially used to kill yourself.
It is not societies job to protect your snot goblin for killing themselves because you let the little tyke have free access to order whatever they want from the internet.
I mean, the solution is rather simple.
Instead of trying to kid-safe the world, why not just make the world less shitty to live in?
It's a 2 birds 1 stone trick, except this proverbial stone will be taking down many more than just 2 birds. Almost all of the current problems we deal with as a society, all stem from how shitty society has become for many people. But because some people are happy with the way things are going, since things are mostly fine for them; the rest of us have to put up with it? And people are surprised when kids, teens and adults are deciding to opt-out? And their best solution is to make it harder for people to find way to opt-out?
Seriously, really?
Is it really so surprising that people would want a fast ride out of hell at that point? Because that's what it must be like for them if they figure ending it all there and then, is better off than putting up with the rest of societies bullshit any longer.
I have more to say on this, but am trying to follow HN's rules about flamewar stuff, and I realize that this comment thread is very easily turned into such a thing unless careful, so I am cutting my comment off here.
The interesting part is that many of the child suicides are in the well off families.
1. Are they well off because they have digital devices?
2. Are they well off because their parents can afford to have just 1 working member?
3. Are they well off because their parents make more than 100k a year? Or some other arbitrary number?
I've met some families in the past that meet all 3 criteria and exceeded the 3rd; but they rent. Are they also well off?
I do think it's interesting that the 'well off' kids are the ones offing themselves. But if that's the case, then we need to look very seriously at what's occurring at that point, because it just means I am more correct than previously stated.
Someone who is well off by the standards of those who are potentially poorer than that person, may still have plenty of other reasons to be unhappy with life. Perhaps not valid to you or I, since they are 'well off', but our opinions on how well to do they are don't matter. The only thing that matters ultimately is that they don't feel like its worth it to continue living.
That, needs to be solved. And that, is part of why I am right about how society has become shitty for many people. Even if they are well to do. Especially so. That should be the last group to be wanting to off itself.
So that tells me that it's not money related, or object related.
It's societally related somehow, in some fashion, which we need to find out, and fix.
Society "being shitty" can be taken many ways. The most common would be seen in amenities/money.
We should do something about it, but what? Again, easier said than done.
Underage children are already not allowed to have Amazon accounts (unless explicitly granted as a sub-account of their parents' account).
How, exactly, would you propose that Amazon determine if the person viewing a page and entering credit card information and a mailing address is a minor?
The only actual solution to this problem is to forbid selling of this specific product on Amazon, which I have no doubt is in process. Many chemicals and OTC medications have already disappeared from Amazon due to fears of abuse by minors.
> t seems reasonable that we should expect (and sadly now demand) that they not promote combinations of products to children that are designed to lead to their death.
There was no such intent in the recommendation algorithm. Did you know this combination of products could be used for suicide before it was blasted all over the internet by these news articles? I didn't, and I doubt anyone at Amazon was aware of it either (until now).
Are you also holding the journalists to the same standard? These articles about "suicide kits" have been filling my social media feeds and news outlets for the past day. The number of minors being exposed to this information by news outlets has to be many orders of magnitude higher than the number of minors who ever saw this combination of "recommended items" on Amazon. Keep in mind that Amazon wasn't just showing this to random shoppers, you had to search for specific ingredients to begin with. Journalists, on the other hand, have been advertising this combination far and wide to everyone who just wants to read news.
Censorship does not involve the exchange of money for goods.
Are you joking? Amazon is one of the A's in FAANG, the mostly highly coveted pseudo-conglomerate to be employed by on HN. People trumpet their roles at FAANG every day here, and most of the rest fawn up to them non-stop.
And that's not even getting started on the obsession with AWS here.
Everyone I know with other options ignores Amazon recruiters.
I don't think this is a niche opinion, though I wouldn't go as far as saying "HN hates Amazon". Hell, I don't even hate Amazon, I buy stuff there all the time.
The most surprising thing about this is that the sensational journalists are getting a free pass. The journalists have now advertised this chemical to the world (including minors who read the news) far, far more than the little box on Amazon that shows related products.
How many people knew that this chemical combined with another medication was used for suicide? Probably not many, until journalists decided that this anti-Amazon story was the next big thing. Now it seems like everyone who follows tech news or sees this scrolling through their social media feed has been informed about this combination of chemicals and how it is used for suicide. Amazon isn't the only place to buy this chemical, and I doubt the recommendation algorithm was the impetus for people searching for the chemical in the first place.
The way this story is blowing up seems utterly dangerous in itself, yet most journalists aren't even bothering to try to hide the names of the chemicals. Amazon's recommendation algorithm didn't have any intent in this process, but all of these journalists broadcasting this information far and wide to boost their personal click rate certainly could have thought a little bit harder about what they were doing.
It's a term commonly used in sucide forums for at least decade.
My biggest question is how these teens are purchasing anything unsupervised on the internet.
Having said that, it also strikes me as a particularly boneheaded business policy to effectively kill off your own customers. At the very least while Amazon is spending millions defending themselves from lawsuits they should be quietly discontinuing this practice.
§ 401 of the California Penal Code, cited in the complaint, states:
"(a) Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony. (b) A person whose actions are compliant with the provisions of the End of Life Option Act (Part 1.85 (commencing with Section 443) of Division 1 of the Health and Safety Code) shall not be prosecuted under this section."
(b) doesn't apply here, as stated in the complaint. Did Amazon meet any of the requirements of (a)? Sodium nitrite is also used for a variety of other valid industrial purposes. They're not alleging intent, but they are alleging that Amazon breached its duty of care by facilitating the sale of the product and by automatically recommending other products to use in conjunction the chemical to ease the suicide.
The core problem with this case is in proving causation. Typically, in cases involving state suicide-assistance statutes that do not involve physician-assisted suicide, the causal chain is far more obvious: it typically involves a person verbally encouraging or furnishing the suicidal person with supplies, suicide pacts, and other similar cases. The theory that a retailer or an e-retailer can be held to have breached its duty of care or that it substantially caused a suicide is unlikely to hold up. It's rather like blaming a hardware store for selling rope. Unless they can prove that Amazon violated the statute, and even if the court considers the negligence claim to be adequately plead, they're not likely going to be able to prove causation.
This is also a much weaker argument than those used to try to hold brick and mortar gun retailers liable for suicides, because some of those theories can at least rely on 15 U.S.C. § 7903 (5)(B) if the person who committed suicide indicated at the point of sale their intention to cause harm to themselves or others.
Amazon and the brand will probably settle the case, but the impact will probably just be that Amazon itself will make life harder for chemical retailers. If there are more controversies they may also just regulate content like "how to kill yourself" e-books more stringently.
And yet we accept automation unblinking, even though automation includes the above scenario.
This is nothing but an attempt at shifting blame.
But when informed of the problem, how on earth can Amazon justify doubling down on this and trying to disclaim all responsibility. At that point, they know that they have been selling suicide kits to children.
This surely makes them complicit in all similar deaths going forward, where these suicide kits have been sold on their platform. What a disgrace.
I can't buy "prescription" pet food from Amazon without an actual "prescription" (for whatever that's worth -- nothing) from a Vet, yet anyone can buy drugs that will kill you.
The irony is abundant, but the results very sad.
I don't know how Amazon should handle this, but given their heavy-handedness over pet food, this seems more than a little absurd.
likewise, I get "carded" now for buying spray paint at Home Depot because some subhuman enjoys huffing
I am tired of the dregs of humanity dictating how the rest of us live
I don't care if you buy spray paint to huff. Enjoy your huffing and stay out of my life
You must buy a lot of paint.
I am curious, though; do you support requiring government-issued ID to vote?