The father of Molly Russell, a depressed 14-year-old who committed suicide in 2017, said on Monday “unconvincing” the response from social networks, whose role in the tragedy has been recognized.
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 lot of content evoking suicide, depression and self-harm.
At the end of September 2022, the British justice had questioned the role played by the content seen by the teenager in her suicide, following a procedure which had revived the debate on the influence of these platforms and their algorithms. .
The ‘coroner’ in charge of the proceedings then sent a report to companies such as Meta, Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat, as well as the UK government, urging a review of the algorithms the sites used to deliver content.
But the reaction from social networks was “unconvincing and unsurprising”, reacted Ian Russell, Molly’s father, in an interview with the PA agency published on Monday.
“The answers vary, but in general they are unconvincing and it seems to me that they indicate an approach business as usual“, he added.
For him, what Meta proposes in its response to the coroner, including the introduction of notifications encouraging users to pause and think about their response before commenting, is not meaningful enough.
“Of course it’s a step forward and a help, but is it really enough to make a significant change?” he asked. “These are really, really minor measures.”
During the procedure to establish the causes of Molly’s death, the justice had considered that the contents seen by the young girl “were not safe” and “should never have been accessible to a child”.
Rather than qualifying her death as suicide, the coroner therefore considered that the young girl “died of an act of self-harm, while suffering from depression and the negative effects of content seen on the internet”.