Amazon Algorithm Recommends Suicide Products

absolutely horrifying: amazon’s algorithm identified a product that people were using to commit suicide. it then started to recommend additional products that made the suicide easier to execute. nytimes.com /2022/02/04/tec... The pleas to Amazon were explicit. A food preservative sold by the online retailer and other e-commerce sites was being used as a poison to die by suicide. “Please stop selling this product,” began one review, posted on Amazon in July 2019 by a person who wrote that a niece had used it to kill herself. “I’ve already notified Amazon and they said they would help with this but they have not.” Since then, suicides linked to sales of the preservative through Amazon have continued. The New York Times identified 10 people who had killed themselves using the chemical compound after buying it through the site in the past two years, including a 16-year-old girl in Ohio, a pair of college freshmen in Pennsylvania and Missouri, and a 27-year-old in Texas whose mother has filed a wrongful-death suit against Amazon. Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.

A dark Twitter post shares a New York Times excerpt reporting that Amazon’s recommendation algorithm identified a food preservative used for suicide and then suggested additional products that could make it easier. The punchline is the horrifyingly literal failure of automated recommendations, presented as an absurd and disturbing example of corporate algorithms optimizing related purchases. It is used as a reaction to algorithmic indifference, dystopian technology, and systems that make a terrible situation even worse.

• @eternalclassic / 8092 2022-02-07