Molly was 14 when she committed Suicide. It was in 2017 and now his father, Ian Russell, has caused a great impact in the United Kingdom with the testimony of what happened. She was the little girl of three sisters, a normal teenager. That night she finished homework and prepared the backpack to go to school. When we woke up the next morning, she was dead. "
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Molly's family could not explain how their little girl had been able to get to that situation. They researched the accounts on the girl's social networks and there they found content about depression and self-harm. "I remember finding a picture with the message: 'This world is very cruel, I do not want to see it anymore,'" Ian Russell told the BBC while denouncing that "I have no doubt that Instagram Helped Kill my daughter.
"There were accounts of people who were depressed, self-injuring or suicidal, and Molly had access to much similar content," explains Russell about the explicit contents with the hashtag #selfharm (# self-injury in English) that pass the filter. censors social networks like Instagram. The same happened with tags like #depression, where they found very hard videos from numerous users.
"We could not imagine that this type of content could be on a platform like Instagram, and it's still there, it 's very easy to find, it's not hidden, it's available," he complains.
Molly had left notes before taking her life very hard, even saying in some of them that "I am the problem of everyone's life".
In the same sense that the father of the little one has been manifested Ged Flynn, director of Papyrus, an organization for the prevention of suicide of young people in the United Kingdom. "Instagram algorithms help users locate related content . By following an account of this type, the social network suggests more, which is very serious and is leading children to easily find content about human tragedies.
The laws about suicide are very clear: encouraging someone to end their life is illegal. Whether on the Internet or in real life, whether with words or images, anyone who suggests that you should do so is at least a potential accomplice. Instagram should take this seriously, "he concludes.
From Instagram make clear, meanwhile, that "we do not allow content that promotes or idealizes eating disorders, self-harm or suicide, we eliminate the content of this type ."
The World Health Organization has warned on several occasions of the increase in suicide rates among young people. Only in 2016, more than 200,000 people between 10 and 29 years old.
