Last month, news came out of Hong Kong that the Hong Kong police are hunting the creator of Facebook group whom encouraging teenagers to commit suicide. The Facebook group entitled “I want to practise suicide” even called on its 190 members to kill themselves on this December 21.

Of course, those suicide-prone kind of Facebook groups have been removed by Facebook and luckily, there aren’t any teenager who commit suicide attributed to the cause of joining the aforesaid “I want to practise suicide” group, according to the news.

Today, ironically, typing the word “自殺”, i.e. suicide still returns a range of nearly 500 Facebook groups which either supports the act of commit suicide or anti the practising of suicide, all fall under the Chinese group name. The problem now is, there is far too easy to create a new Facebook group, invite few friends and then start a topic discussion. And the worst, people nowadays want to go into the virtual world in order to deal with their emotional problems, you doubt they will talk to the real people when they have emotional problems in the “real” world, and eventually, they received the commit suicide advices.

To show the number-wise of those suicide-prone Facebook groups still around us, here are few of them.

This group entitled, “Practise Suicide, Good for Health”; A funny theme, existed while I capture its picture few days ago, but it is not available in the search database today.

As I mentioned earlier, there is an overuse of suicide word on Facebook. I randomly click on the pro or con suicide groups on Facebook, the below three (3) groups showed different characteristics that directly or indirectly encouraging suicides among teenagers.

1) 自殺團(重開) Suicide Group (Re-Open)

Although the admin is not found, but the description of the group might lead to the negative outcomes.

2) 我要自殺(廢物無罪) I want to Suicide (Rubbish Is Not Guilty)

Problem is, reading the posts on the Wall this group tend to build a community resolving around the topic of commit suicide is not a wrong doing.

3) 自殺研究 Suicide Analysis

Facebook users, do you need to analyze why you want / do not want to suicide?

My take is while I don’t believe in social networks are the root of the suicide problems. However, there is an urgency to stop the users from using “自殺”, i.e. suicide when creating the Facebook groups. Social networks suppose to bring people together for a better life rather than to guide them, and eventual lead them to the suicide path.

Lastly, take a look at this Facebook group name, “facebook是我們自殺的終站,” i.e. Facebook is the ultimate way of our suicides.

No, it isn’t.