“The Kindness of Strangers:” The Influence of Social Media on the Construction of Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), termed a psychiatric “Factitious disorder by proxy”, compels individuals to solicit unnecessary medical interventions or commit medical abuses on another, almost always a child in their care. A recent phenomenon is that of individuals with FDIA using social media such as blogs and online support groups to perpetuate such abuse, while garnering sympathy from others who access these sites. Through an examination of several recent high profile FDIA by Internet cases and using the concept of “neo-tribes’ to identify the virtual communities of interest that form around these cases, new dimensions of FDIA appear. Fabrication of medical and social histories is facilitated and consolidated in the virtual sphere and readily enhanced through imagery and careful documentation. Betrayed communities experience exploitation and fraud. However, child neglect and child endangerment remain of concern, and identifying and investigating such claims across physical jurisdictions remain significant challenges for law enforcement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".