(Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. is tightening its policies and expanding resources to help prevent suicide and self-harm, responding to concerns about the role social media plays in adolescent mental health.In a blog post on World Suicide Day, Facebook said it will no longer allow graphic cutting images and will make it harder to search for this type of content. Facebook said it’s also prohibiting additional content on its apps that may promote eating disorders.As part of the changes, Facebook plans to hire a health and well-being expert to join its safety policy team who will look for ways to boost support for users, including topics related to suicide and self-injury. Facebook is also exploring ways to share public data from its platform about how people talk about suicide, starting with giving academic researchers access to CrowdTangle, a tool often used by news and media organizations to monitor social media.The move follows red flags raised by governments and academics about rising rates of suicides among teens that appear to correspond to the increasing popularity of social media. A study published by the JAMA Open Network in May didn’t cite a specific cause for an increase in suicides since 2007, but other researchers who looked at the data questioned the role of social media in the spike of incidents. In April, the U.K. asked Facebook, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Snap Inc., to commit to dealing with the issue.Facebook said it will include guidelines for talking about mental health by Orygen, an organization that studies youth mental health, to the platform’s Safety Center.“Experts have told us that one of the most effective ways to prevent suicide is for people to hear from friends and family who care about them,” Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety wrote on the blog. “Facebook has a unique role in facilitating those kinds of connections and we’re taking additional steps to support those who are discussing these sensitive topics, especially young people.”To contact the reporter on this story: Kiley Roache in New York at kroache@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz, Robin AjelloFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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