British Ruling Pins Blame on Social Media for Teenager’s Suicide (original) (raw)
Business|British Ruling Pins Blame on Social Media for Teenager’s Suicide
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicide-ruling-britain.html
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A photo album of Molly Russell, who died in November 2017.Credit...Jonathan Clifford for The New York Times
The internet, according to the ruling, “affected her mental health in a negative way and contributed to her death in a more than minimal way.”
A photo album of Molly Russell, who died in November 2017.Credit...Jonathan Clifford for The New York Times
Adam Satariano, who covers technology issues from London, has talked to people involved in this case since 2020.
- Oct. 1, 2022
Sitting in the witness box of a small London courtroom this week, a Meta executive faced an uncomfortable question: Did her company contribute to the suicide of a 14-year-old named Molly Russell?
Videos and images of suicide, self-harm and depressive content that the teenager viewed in the months before she died in November 2017 appeared on a screen in the courtroom. The executive was read a post that Molly had liked or saved from Instagram, and heard how it was copied almost verbatim in a note filled with words of self-loathing later found by her parents.
“This is Instagram literally giving Molly ideas,” Oliver Sanders, a lawyer representing the family, said angrily during one moment of the exchange.
Leaning forward in the witness chair, the executive, Elizabeth Lagone, who leads the company’s health and well-being policy, responded: “I can’t speak to what was going on in Molly’s mind.”
The coroner overseeing the case, who in Britain is a judgelike figure with wide authority to investigate and officially determine a person’s cause of death, was far less circumspect. On Friday, he ruled that Instagram and other social media platforms had contributed to her death — perhaps the first time anywhere that internet companies have been legally blamed for a suicide.
“Molly Rose Russell died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content,” said the coroner, Andrew Walker. Rather than officially classify her death a suicide, he said the internet “affected her mental health in a negative way and contributed to her death in a more than minimal way.”
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