Simone Back, quarterback (not).
Pictured above is Simone Back, a 42-year-old retired quarterback woman with 1,048 Facebook friends. On Christmas day she posted this as her status message:
Took all my pills be dead soon bye bye everyone.
After reading her status, hundreds of people rushed to her apartment to see if she’s alright a handful of her Facebook friends started arguing whether she’s actually doing it or just craving attention, but none of them went to her place to check on her. She was found dead the next day.
It’s a sad story, but there’s something bugging me about it. And that is the attitude taken by the media and charities towards her case, as they are trying to put responsibility on her Facebook network. When will they realize that friendship connections on Facebook are as valuable and tight as the friendship connection between you and a bowl of cereal.
Graham Bell, from the Brighton and Hove Depression Alliance, said: “This is a very sad reflection on our community. People need to be friends in the real world as well as in the online world.”
A spokeswoman from the charity Mind said: “Loved ones can find it very difficult to know how to support someone who is experiencing mental distress whether this is being communicated face to face or online. It is a myth that people who talk about suicide don’t go through with it. In fact, when someone is feeling suicidal they are very likely to have spoken about their feelings of desperation to others at some point.”
Clearly, Miss Back, a charity shop worker, had spoken to her “friends” about her suicidal feelings.
The only reason this woman had 1,048 Facebook friends (connections is a better word) was because she was probably playing Farmville or something similar. Since she’s not famous and doesn’t have the body of a model, there’s absolutely no way she knew more than maybe 50 of her Facebook contacts, the rest of them being nothing but strangers with which she exchanged game gifts. And out of those 50, only a couple probably cared about her at all. Which explains why in the end nobody did anything.
tl;dr: 1,000 of her Facebook friends were strangers
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