“Post self-harm and depression affected her mental health,” the investigation concludes
Social media are guilty of the suicide of a British girl. These conclusions were reached by the investigation, presented yesterday to the Court by the English coroner Andrew Walker, who investigated the circumstances of the suicide of Molly Russel, the fourteen-year-old who took her own life in 2017 in her family’s home in Harrow, a northern neighborhood. – West London.
According to Walker’s analysis, whose role in the English legal system roughly corresponds to that of a coroner, Molly’s death was determined by an act of extreme self-harm, resulting in a depressive state that would have made her particularly vulnerable. surely, however, her precarious state of mental health would have been exasperated, to the point of leading her to kill herself, largely due to exposure to particularly explicit contents, which dealt with suicide, depression and self-harm.
In a nutshell, the sentencea expresses for the first time the concept that the uncontrolled contents of social platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest can be considered as triggers for the suicide of a minor person. To all intents and purposes Molly Russel before killing herself had ventured through an incredible multitude of posts, which dealt with the diseases she suffered from. In the last six months of her life alone, before killing herself, she would have interacted or shared, only on Instagram, 2,100 posts on self-harm, suicide, depression. In the 1,800 days or so that have composed these six months of self-suggestion on the themes of her suffering, there are only twelve in which her navigation has not been attracted by the arguments that would have induced her to kill herself.
The ruling clearly agreed with the child protection body in England. The Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza has asked the platforms cited in the sentence to take action to change “from an ethical point of view”. Molly’s father, Ian Russell, described his daughter’s descent into a hellish world, in which once you have fallen into her it is not possible to escape, because the algorithm continues to recommend more and more contents consistent with one’s curiosities. The case caused such an uproar that even William, the Prince of Wales. the said of him in a statement, which in reality reiterates a concept of those that it is obvious to share: “Online safety for our children and young people must be a prerequisite, not a secondary aspect”. An “official” statement that, in addition to confirming a sacrosanct principle, does not take into account the reality that moves the entire universe of social networks, which could be summarized in a crude but realistic maxim: “The more I keep you connected to me the more you make me earn. For this reason, the more I feed your interest with what you make me understand you want to see, the less you will want to detach yourself from me ».
One of the most colossal businesses in history is articulated on this and only on this, so in exchange for a connection to the immense land of toys, the whole of humanity has voluntarily sold out their private life, has agreed to barter every hidden secret. of his own relational activity, of his own tastes of his own weaknesses, of every most unspeakable inner turmoil.
For Molly, the trouble was the anguish of living, caused by toxic parasites that burrowed into her brain. The social network has fed these parasites until they are strong enough to kill.
Coroner Andrew Walker is certainly right, when he writes in the ruling that the images of self-harm and suicide that Molly saw “should not have been available to a child”, proving how the algorithms of Instagram and Pinterest led the girl to that. indigestion effect called “binge watching” of situations in which self-destructive acts entered an almost fictionalized narrative, at the peak of which suicide was exposed as an inevitable outcome.
The party in question, that is the representatives of Pinterest and Instagram, followed the hearings and admitted that, in Molly’s use of the materials “toxic” to her mental health, there will certainly have been irregularities with respect to their policies. If nothing else, the fact that Molly had been on Instagram since she was 12. She could not have been before 13. Of course they will work, they will operate, they will provide.
Will anything change? No, let’s be sure, nothing will change. The great game that trains humans to digital existence will mourn a new victim for a while. However, this does not mean that he will be able (or will) to stop.
The ability of less equipped humans to train to manage the game could certainly become a compulsory didactic. Here, however, cultural maturity should come into play, which is certainly not stimulated by judgments.
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