Berlinquette had heard the story of a man named Kevin Hines, a man who had attempted suicide by walking off of the Golden Gate Bridge. After surviving the fall, Hines wrote an article about his experience. One passage stood out to Berlinquette:
If someone had intervened that day [the day he jumped], things would have absolutely been different. Due to my psychosis on that day, I could not say aloud “I need help now.” Yet, I desperately wanted someone to say to me, “Are you OK? Is something wrong?” or “Can I help you?”Had any one of the hundreds of passersby engaged with me, it would have given me permission to share my darkness, and potentially have showed me that I had the ability on that day to choose life.
What if, Berlinquette asked himself, there were a way to intervene with someone considering suicide or self-harm? What kind of intervention would work?
Having worked for Google previously, Berlinquette was familiar with a different kind of intervention strategy, The Redirect Method (RM). RM was an anti-radicalization initiative aiming to interrupt ISIS's ability to recruit and radicalize people online. Using Google Adwords (now Google Ads), RM made use of the same tools that advertisers use to make their company's ads appear in response to a user's Google search. I search for "foam mattresses," and then I magically see "sponsored" results from foam mattress companies mixed in--even listed above--legitimate search results.
RM wanted to use that power to resist ISIS recruitment. They successfully curated a set of preexisting videos and webpages that made ISIS and radicalization look unattractive. Using Adwords, they managed to get those counter-ISIS results mixed in with "authentic" (or "organic") search results from certain key words or phrases. The tactic appears to have worked, at least for some potential ISIS recruits. Typing something like "join ISIS" into Google yielded the anti-ISIS results.
Could something similar work to prevent people from delving further into suicidal ideation? Berlinquette wondered. To find out, he followed the blueprint that RM laid out (ostensibly for like-minded anti-radicalization groups). He whipped up a webpage that had the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's number on it, purchasing (for a few hundred bucks) the ability to have that website listed when a user would enter certain phrases (such as "I want to end it all"). Results were quite promising. "Nearly one in three searchers who clicked my ad dialed the hotline — a conversion rate of 28 percent," he reports. "The average Google Ads conversion rate is 4 percent." When that campaign ended, he started another one to redirect potential mass shooters. That too seemed to work.
Great job, Berlinquette. Right?
Yet Berlinquette's own success, the ease with which he found himself able to manipulate Google results, gave him pause. His advertising background taught him the power of micro-moments, instances where people reflexively turn to a device or screen to divert or occupy themselves. At such moments, users make themselves open to influence. A Google search for a product (an initial step in the purchasing process) often coincides with such micro-moments. An ad argeted at such a micro-moment and tailored to the searcher's input has incredible potential to shape or, as it were, redirect a user's purchase/attention.
Half of all Google's users, Berlinquette writes, cannot readily distinguish between ad results and organic results. That's good if you're leading someone away from a dangerous path. It's a good thing that the Redirect Project and Berlinquette's variations on it capitalize on micro-moments' openness.
But, Berlinquette notes, nothing in Google's infrastructure checks or ensures that such micro-momentary redirects route users in beneficent directions. "Google let me run the ads with no issue." he writes. "It didn’t seem to care what the
language on my website was, or what phone number I directed people to.
There was no vetting process to become a redirector. I didn’t need
qualifications to be a conduit of peoples’ fates"
And if he can follow RM's blueprint, he warns, just about anyone can. So, in an effort to do more good, Berlinquette raises the alarm about the microtemporal avenues of advertisements salted throughout Google search results. He has no easy solutions, of course. It's unlikely, he tells interviewer Robin Young, that Google or the companies involved would support making advertisements seem less like authentic search results. Doing so would snap people out of the micro-moment. Some other kind of intervention (cough, cough, government) must happen instead.
Until it does, perhaps I'll start using DuckDuckGo.
More tomorrow,
JF
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