My horrifying journey into social media’s DEPTHS OF DARKNESS
By Katherine Rushton, who posed as a girl of 14 to expose how easy it is for children to find mages that glamorise self-harm and suicide
My screen was full of nooses and teens with cut arms
ON THE screen in front of me, an elegantly manicured hand is squeezing blood from a thigh that has been crisscrossed with cuts. They open gently under the pressure, and the anonymous fingertips spread the blood over her skin.
It is one of hundreds of grotesque videos that have filled my screen in the past 24 hours, as I masquerade as a 14-year old girl on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
Clicking on one of the many hashtags below each gory post reveals a new selection of images. There are dozens of slashed wrists, a woman’s neck laced with cuts, a naked girl covered in blood with a knife blade deep in her mouth. ‘Bury me face down,’ reads the caption. Such descriptions are upsetting to read, but there is no gentle way to describe the sheer volume and horror of material before me, which every parent should be aware of.
Each hashtag indexes thousands, or even millions, of posts, allowing children to bring up page upon page of shocking results with just a few taps on their smartphone. And once they show an interest in these vile posts, the social networks start to feed them even more grim images.
This is the dark underbelly of social media, where anyone who shows a shred of curiosity about suicide or self-harm quickly finds themself falling down a terrifying rabbit hole.
The social networks are so brutally efficient at identifying any interest, a user’s feed quickly becomes wallpapered with morbid material — and children are bombarded with suggestions of new accounts to follow for the chance to be served with even more grim images.
This is an online horror that has sucked some vulnerable young users under. Last week, the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell blamed Instagram for her death, saying she took her life after looking at posts on the social network that glamorised suicide.
In a heartbreaking interview, Ian Russell told how the London teenager had packed her bag for school before ending her life. Later, he revealed that Pinterest, the virtual scrapbook website, even emailed her with suicide tips after her death.
Having spent 24 hours posing as a teenager on social media, I am horrified by what I have seen. It has absolutely nothing in common with the versions of the same websites that I experience as an adult.
I signed up to the websites using a false name and date of birth, along with my real phone number and email address. At no point was I asked for identification or anything to prove my age — all they wanted was my word.
Instagram requested my name, and either an email or phone number. I used the latter — the same number I use for my own Instagram account — and it quickly sent me a verification code. It then asked if I was under or over 18. I ticked the box that ‘confirmed’ me as a child, and entered my real birthday but with the year amended.
The process was similar with Pinterest. For Facebook, I was able to enter an email address I rarely use and was again sent a verification code to gain access.
Whether it is Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, people see a version of these social media sites that is minutely tailored to their particular interests.
The sites are powered by complex computer algorithms devised by some of the brightest minds in the world, with one overriding purpose: to keep users glued to their screens for as long as possible and rake in advertising dollars.
Facebook, which counts Instagram as part of its empire, racked up nearly €47 billion in revenues in 2017, the last full-year results at time of going to press.
The upshot of these dizzying algorithms is that no two social media feeds are the same.
Someone with an interest in gardening will be served pictures of other people’s perfectly tended borders, while a nature-lover will be treated to wildlife photographs. My own ‘grown-up’ Instagram feed is filled with children and other people’s posh interiors. It is the same sort of set-up on Pinterest. Most devotees use the site like a ‘mood board’ to help them plan weddings and assist with crafts and decorating projects.
Many middle-aged users will be dimly aware that the sight of other people’s perfectly polished lives on social media can lead to a degree of dissatisfaction with their own life.
But if they think they know what Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are like for millions of youngsters, they are almost certainly wrong.
In my online experiment, I posed as a 14-year-old — the same age as Molly — and searched each platform for some of the hashtags I have seen used on grim posts in the past.
Dangerous posts are easily accessible on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest by searching for certain hashtags (which the Mail is not revealing).
To Facebook and Pinterest’s credit, searches for the word ‘suicide’, specifically, draw a blank. But Instagram merely ‘checks’ that I am okay before flashing up a screen.
‘Can we help?’, it asks, offering me buttons to ‘Get support’ or ‘See posts anyway’. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination to believe a vulnerable teenager might opt for the latter.
Many of the images that flood the screen of my smartphone are moody black-and-white shots that, at first glance, would not look out of place in a posh coffee-table book. But on closer inspection they are simply gruesome.
On Instagram, one hashtag directs me to a picture of a beautiful young woman lying back in the bath, fully dressed, eyes closed, her dark hair spreading out about her. ‘I just want to die’ reads the caption.
Another picture offers an illustration of a tree as a silhouette. A child is swinging from a branch on one side. On the other, there is a person hanging.
In no time at all, I have clicked on more hashtags and start following some of those who post these images.
To those not on Instagram, it is hard to convey how easy it is to hurtle down this path. Within the space of a few hours, the app on my smartphone that I often use for idle distraction has become a grim shortcut to bleakness.
I tap on another hashtag. This time, up comes a picture of a noose next to a poem.
‘What if I died? / I doubt you’d even cry./ Would you even care/ If I took my own life?’ it asks.
Underneath, the user has written: ‘Who wants my life, cause [sic] I don’t’.’ Apparently oblivious to her pain, one of her followers has commented: ‘Gorgeous, I am loving this!’
Heartbreakingly, the user says in her ‘bio’ at the top of the page: ‘Last cut: 22/01/19’. Reading through the comments she has left on other posts, it is clear she is still at school.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media websites for young teens, but others are every bit as harmful.
Posing as a 14-year-old on Pinterest, I select topics such as the vampire film Twilight and drawing as my interests.
So I am frightened to see that, after just a little searching, the website is proposing names that include the word ‘suicide’ for my virtual ‘pin boards’.
Whenever I log on, it suggests new images for me to pin. Many of them feature drawings of people who have hanged themselves.
One drawing depicts an old tree on a riverbank, with a noose tied to one of its branches and dangling over the water. Below are the words: ‘Are you? Are you coming to the tree?’
Even when I am not on the site, it nudges me back, emailing me with new suggested images and the instruction: ‘Don’t leave these pins hanging.’
Facebook made things slightly harder than the other two websites, presumably after extreme pressure from the media and governments worldwide. But even so, it took just a few minutes of searching, and
Young people are bombarded with suicide porn
king on the profiles of search ults, to access gruesome tures. uddenly my screen was full of oses and teenagers who had agely cut their arms. When did you start?’ one user ed. ‘Me, I was 14.’ he cumulative effect of these ocking images cannot be restimated. hen a young person is thinking out suicide, they may seek idation from others who are ring their pain,’ says Ged Flynn, the young suicide prevention arity Papyrus. ‘This may mpound their suicidality.’ acebook claims having self-harm ges online actually helps young ple reach out for help. But it also malises self-harm and glamorises cide in a way that can be gerously compelling. ake no mistake, if young people o dip a toe into this sort of cont are bombarded with ‘suicide n’, then the equivalent is happening to those who show an interest in dangerous weight loss, extremism and anti-Semitism.
It is hard to believe the web giants could not clean up these platforms if they really wanted to.
Facebook has honed an algorithm so startlingly proficient it can recognise users’ faces as they grow up, harvest data about every aspect of their lives and target them with advertisements with pinpoint accuracy.
The €358billion internet company has also developed technology that stamps out child sex abuse imagery, blocking it from the platform before it has even been uploaded. It is inconceivable that it could not eradicate self-harm images in the same way.
It also stretches credulity that technology firms, from Facebook to Pinterest and Google, cannot put proper age controls on their sites to ensure no children under the age of 13 can access them.
As things stand, they have made barely any effort.
The majority of these US companies simply ask users to tick a box confirming they are over 13, or enter a birth date. It is easy simply to make one up, as I did for this investigation.
Facebook’s new PR chief, Nick Clegg, promised this week that it will do ‘whatever it takes’ to make its websites safer in the wake of the Molly Russell tragedy.
And Instagram has announced it will make it harder for teenagers to look for suicide content, so that searches for certain banned words draw a blank, as they do on Facebook. It will also stop recommending accounts that post suicide porn, and — from next week — will introduce a ‘sensitivity screen’ in front of vile self-harm images, so the posts will appear blurred to users who do not click through to see more.
A spokesman said in a statement: ‘We have a deep responsibility to make sure young people using Instagram are safe.
‘We take this seriously and are taking action. We want to be sure we’re getting this right.’
Pinterest also plans changes. It is working on ways to stop users uploading suicide porn, and will automatically filter images linked to ‘sensitive’ topics out of its search results.
A spokesman said it was ‘deeply upsetting’ that users access disturbing content on its platform, adding that Pinterest has started ‘reaching out to more experts’ to work out how it can become ‘more effective and compassionate’.
Welcome though these efforts are, the words of the tech companies ring hollow. Why are they only taking action now? And why doesn’t Instagram remove the self-harm and suicide posts altogether?
Curious teens will still be able to click through to the gory images, and hurtle down a dark path by tapping on the hashtags at the bottom of self-harm posts.
The supposed crackdown is hardly, as Mr Clegg pledged, ‘whatever it takes’.
This newspaper has been writing about the problem of suicide porn on the internet and the need to protect our children online for years. It shouldn’t take the highly publicised death of a schoolgirl to prompt action.
It is perhaps not surprising that children’s campaigners have lost faith in the social networks’ ability to tackle the problem.
In a letter to the web giants this week, one asked if they have ‘any control’ over the content on their platforms ‘any longer’. If that were not the case, she added, ‘then children should not be accessing your services at all, and parents should be aware that the idea of any authority overseeing algorithms and content is a mirage’.
In the meantime, a generation of children is in danger.