The father of Molly Russell, a depressed 14-year-old who committed suicide in 2017, said on Monday, January 16, that the response from social media, whose role in the tragedy has been acknowledged, is “unconvincing.”
Molly Russell died in November 2017. Trying to understand her gesture, her relatives discovered that she had been exposed on social networks, mainly Instagram and Pinterest, to a large amount of content that evoked suicide, depression and self-harm.
A review of the algorithms.
At the end of September 2022, the British justice had questioned the role of the content seen by the teenager in her suicide, after a procedure that had revived the debate on the influence of these platforms and their algorithms.
The “coroner” in charge of the procedure then sent a report to companies including Meta, Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat, as well as the British government, urging a review of the algorithms used by the sites to provide content.
But the reaction on social media was “unconvincing and unsurprising,” Molly’s father Ian Russell said in an interview with PA published Monday.
“Really Minor Measures”
For him, what Meta is proposing in its response to the forensics, including introducing notifications that encourage users to pause and think about their response before commenting, is not meaningful enough.
During the “investigation” procedure to establish the causes of Molly’s death, the court considered that the content seen by the young woman “was not safe” and “should never have been accessible to a child.”
Instead of classifying her death as suicide, the coroner considered that the young woman “died from an act of self-harm, while suffering from depression and the negative effects of the content seen on the Internet.”
Source: BFM TV
