Building Trustworthy Mental Health Benchmarks on Bluesky: A Validation-Aware Weak-Supervision Framework
TL;DR
These findings show that decentralized social media can support reproducible mental health benchmarking, but only when system design, label provenance, validation strategy, and deployment constraints are evaluated together.
Abstract
Decentralized social media platforms create new opportunities and challenges for computational mental health research because data access, moderation, labeling, and deployment responsibilities are distributed across multiple technical and governance layers. This paper presents a validation-aware weak-supervision system for constructing and evaluating suicidal ideation (SI) and broader mental health (MH) disclosure benchmarks on Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform built on the AT Protocol. The system integrates public firehose collection, task-specific lexicon filtering, Llama-3-8B-assisted binary annotation, human-adjudicated validation subsets, and transformer-based model benchmarking. Using this pipeline, we construct two task-specific corpora containing 8,346 SI-labeled posts and 9,988 MH-labeled posts. The evaluation shows that model performance depends strongly on both task definition and validation protocol. BERT+LSTM achieves the highest SI stratified cross-validation F1-score, RoBERTa achieves the strongest SI holdout F1-score, and DistilRoBERTa achieves the best MH cross-validation F1-score. Human validation reveals different weak-label failure modes across tasks, with SI labels dominated by false negatives and MH labels dominated by false positives. These findings show that decentralized social media can support reproducible mental health benchmarking, but only when system design, label provenance, validation strategy, and deployment constraints are evaluated together.
