The suicide of a teenager is a horrendous tragedy. Everyone who loved them is left with an anguish that will never entirely heal, and a longing to understand the reasons for the catastrophe. In an increasing number of cases, it appears that interactions on social media have contributed to the victim’s despair: since the parents of 14-year-old Molly Russell told their story, another 30 bereaved parents have come forward to the teenage suicide prevention trust, Papyrus, with stories of how social media helped make their children’s suffering seem unbearable. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has spoken of his own horror at the apparent complacency of social media companies and demanded that they take action. That’s easier than telling them what to do.
The extreme concentration of power on the social internet in the hands of three or four companies means that governments have a target for their pressure. If Facebook (which owns WhatsApp and Instagram), Google (which owns YouTube), Twitter, and Pinterest all decide to ban some content it will not disappear but it will become very much harder to find, and their algorithms could be tweaked so as not to serve it.
Vulnerable users could be identified not just by age, but by their interests: among the categories Google or Facebook offer to advertisers are “depression”, “panic and anxiety” and “eating disorders”, along with “sexual health”. Such interests on the part of users are deduced much more subtly than by simply making a note of search terms; the algorithms that produce them are opaque even to their creators. It is on one level extremely worrying that giant advertising companies have such insights into our mental states and preoccupations, but while they do so our government should have no scruples in making use of this information to protect the vulnerable rather than to exploit them. If we allow internet companies to collect and refine this data in the first place, they cannot be allowed to escape the responsibilities that their knowledge brings with it. Teenagers live as much of their social lives online now as they do at school. If a school were to have an outbreak of suicides, we would question what it had done or left undone that might have led to this. The same standards should apply to the social media giants.
The really difficult question is what they can do, and how. They cannot teach machines to do it, much as they might hope to do so. There are loving and supportive places online in which statements like “I hate myself and I wish I was dead” are cries for help which can be answered. There are others in which they are a signal of weakness and an invitation to further cruelty. Only human eyes – expensive and time-consuming as they are – can tell them apart and judge whether a given space is safe. There is a further technological problem which appears as social media move away from words to pictures: when communication is meme-ified and reduced to attention-grabbing slogans, this can disrupt the sort of patient attention that unhappy people actually need and may make them easier to hurt. Inspirational quotes don’t help depression, but a cutting remark could make a miserable child reach for a razor blade.
The social media companies are giant advertising businesses. The difficulty of their task here doesn’t let them off the hook. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable, not least to pressure from other teenagers. Society – parents, politicians, and the companies themselves – must do more to protect them and must never allow the pursuit of profit to seem more important than the relief of suffering.
