Instagram deleted 1.7m images following Molly Russell suicide

INSTAGRAM removed nearly 10,000 images related to suicide and self-harm every day in the months following the controversy around Molly Russell’s death, but relied on users to report one in five, according to statistics.

Figures released by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, showed that almost 1.7million images were removed between April and September this year, an average of 9,180 per day.

However, only 79 per cent were detected automatically using artificial intelligence – well below the 95 per cent rate achieved for child nudity and sex abuse images and the 92 per cent rate achieved for terrorist propaganda.

A Facebook spokesman attributed that gap to the difficulty of distinguishing between genuinely harmful content and mental health sufferers sharing their experiences in order to aid others’ recovery. It comes after Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after looking at images of self-harm and suicide on social media, said he was “grateful” for the improvements that Instagram had made but that it was “only inching along the road”.

Mr Russell, from Harrow, in north London, has become a prominent online safety campaigner and backed The Telegraph’s campaign for tech giants to be subject to a statutory duty of care.

On Tuesday he met with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who voiced their concern about “disturbing content” online. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity and safety, said: “For the first time, we are sharing data on how we are doing at enforcing our policies on Instagram...

“Recent advancements in [AI] technology have helped with rate of detection and removal of violating content.”

The company said that the overall prevalence of self-harm and suicide content on Instagram remained very low, with a maximum of four in every 10,000 views including it.

In January, Instagram was plunged into crisis when Mr Russell blamed the social media site for “helping” to kill his daughter by allowing her to become entangled in online communities that encouraged self-harm.

Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vicepresident of global policy, said that Molly’s death was “absolutely horrific” and “a tragedy” that the company was determined to learn from by regularly consulting mental health experts and improving its systems.