Social media: glorifying self-harm?
It is associated with its pictures of stylish interiors, perfect weddings and beautifully iced cakes – but “the death of Molly Russell has revealed a darker side of Pinterest”, said Rosamund Urwin and Sian Griffiths in The Sunday Times. In November 2017, Molly was 14. The youngest of three sisters, she seemed well and happy: a keen rider and sailor, she’d recently won a lead part in her school play. Only after she took her own life did her parents discover that she had depression. A “caring soul”, she’d not burdened them with her anxieties; instead, she’d gone online to explore her feelings, on sites such as Pinterest and the Facebook-owned Instagram. There, her father believes she was bombarded by graphic images of self-harm and references to suicide that helped drive her to kill herself. A month after she died, Pinterest sent her an email containing a photo of a slashed thigh and the phrase “I can’t tell you how many times I wish I was dead”.
Facebook insists that content that glorifies self-harm or suicide has no place on its platforms, but its new communications director, Nick Clegg, insisted this week that people sharing their anxieties online can also be a positive thing. Of course, mental health issues should be aired online – but it’s not a line Instagram is toeing very well, said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. In just a few clicks on the app, I found a range of “stomach-churning” images of people cutting themselves, accompanied by such “insidious” comments as: “Suicidal people are just angels who want to go home.”
We know how these platforms work, said The Sun. Using algorithms, they identify what piques users’ interests, then feed them more of it (“if you liked that, you might like this”). It’s designed to keep them online, but the result can be to lure them to ever more extreme material. With the suicide prevention charity Papyrus saying it has heard of 30 cases similar to Molly’s, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has now warned the social media giants to take action, said The Independent. But we’ve been here before. Concerns about harmful content have been raised for years; each time, Facebook and co promise to do better – but little changes. They say that they are just platforms, not publishers, and that it’s hard for them to make judgements about dangerous content. But more likely their reluctance stems from the cost of recruiting moderators and changing their algorithms. Companies focused on profits won’t make that kind of investment voluntarily: we need the Government to force their hands.