Has Social Media Fueled a Teen Suicide Crisis?

Sexual abuse and exploitation are common in the allegations: A girl tried to commit suicide twice when she was 11, after being contacted by men on Roblox and then on Discord, one of whom prompted her to send explicit photos on Snapchat , where photos disappear (although they can). still a screenshot). A boy was persuaded to send illegal photos to a user, also via Snapchat, after which the person sent back a collage of the images as blackmail. One lawsuit, citing a leaked Meta document in which an employee alleged that the People You May Know feature had historically “contributed to 75% of all inappropriate contacts between adults and minors,” claims that Meta “incredibly caused was the decision to continue using the user recommendation products regardless.” (Meta says it has developed technology to prevent potentially suspicious accounts from communicating with teens.)

Bergman told me about a boy who was inundated with TikTok videos telling him to jump in front of a train — and he did. Another young man posted about his grief after a breakup and was sent videos telling him to shoot his head off – which he did. “These are children who are being pointedly targeted at suicidal content,” Bergman said. ‘It’s Orwellian. You can’t run away from the bully. It’s like running straight into his fist.’ Even parents who recognize social media as a problem can face tragedy when trying to protect their children from it: “Sarah was extremely distraught after her phone was taken and . . . thought she couldn’t live without Defendants’ social media products,” a complaint reads. “Sarah went upstairs, found her father’s gun and shot herself in the head.”

Brandy and Toney Roberts, who live in New Iberia, Louisiana, have emerged as faces of the movement to protect children from social media, appearing on “60 Minutes” and other news programs. When they speak of their daughter Englyn, who died by suicide in September 2020 at the age of fourteen, they conjure her up so vividly that you expect to see her enter the room grinning, bubbly and demanding. One of Englyn’s friends put a recording of her laughter into a Build-a-Bear plush that she gave to Brandy and Toney; when you lean on it, as I accidentally did, hilarious sounds erupt. On the living room couch is a pillow printed with a snapshot taken during a trip to Destin, Florida. Englyn hugs Brandy and her face lights up with joy. A week after the photo was taken, she hanged herself.

As the youngest in a family of seven siblings, half-brothers and step-siblings, Englyn was doted on and even spoiled. Because she loved to travel, she and her parents got in the car and Toney said, “East or West or North or South?” and off they went, as soon as they reached New Mexico. Toney loved to spoil his daughter, taking her for a manicure she suddenly craved or picking up dinner late at night. Brandy tried to set boundaries and warned her daughter, who seemed confident and even regal, that people in their community, the black community, did not like someone who seemed full of themselves.

On the last Saturday of August 2020, Toney made soup for dinner, but Englyn didn’t have much. “Baby girl, you haven’t eaten,” Toney said. “My soup wasn’t tasty?” He suggested they order pizza, and he, Brandy, and Englyn stayed up late to eat. Around 10:30 p.m., Englyn asked her parents if they wanted to watch a movie. “Oh no, girl, we’re tired,” Toney said. Before she went upstairs, her parents said, as always, “I love you,” and she said, “I love you,” and kissed them both.

Later that evening, the mother of a friend of Englyn’s who was texting with her contacted Brandy and urged her to check on her. Toney and Brandy were surprised to find Englyn’s door locked. When they came in, they didn’t see her, so Toney went to look behind the bed. “All of a sudden I turned around and she was hanging there,” he told me as we stood in Englyn’s bedroom. She had used an extension cord to hang herself from a door hinge. “It seems like an eternity has passed, and I get her down and Brandy starts CPR.”

When paramedics arrived, they detected a pulse and Englyn was placed on life support at the hospital. “And you pray and pray and pray for nine days, vigils outside, just everything you can humanly do,” Toney said. On September 7, doctors advised the Robertses to discontinue life support. “You ask yourself, ‘What is she feeling? Does she feel anything?” Toney recalled. He and Brandy were joined at the hospital by his mother and two priests, and everyone said their final goodbyes.

Of all the bedrooms of children who died by suicide that I visited during my reporting, Englyn’s is the most carefully preserved: every pair of shoes in the same place where she had kept them, the bed still made and occupied by a row teddy bears. “She had these socks on that night,” Toney said. “This is where I found her. Do you see that box? She stood on that box.” The box was right behind the door, where Englyn must have placed it before putting the cord around her neck.

After Englyn died, Toney checked her phone. In the family videos he showed me, Englyn looks not only happy but joyful, bursting into laughter and singing, yet she took photos of herself cutting and posted thoughts like “I’ve been feeling ugly lately. ‘ After turning fourteen, she posted a birthday photo with the caption “Swipe to see my real shape”; the next photo showed a distortion of her figure. A longer message read: ‘One day I’ll leave this world and never come back, you’ll cry when you see a picture of me. . . . So you have to appreciate me before I’m gone.

Instagram’s algorithms had been sending her increasingly disturbing suicidal content. In one post, a black woman shouted: “Stop this madness. What do you want from me? What do you want? Please. Please.” The woman then pretended to hang herself with an electrical cord, just as Englyn eventually did.

Two people drinking coffee in the coffee shop.

Brandy had checked Englyn’s phone often, looking for inappropriate photos or profanity; it never occurred to her to watch the videos Instagram recommended. After Englyn died, Toney and Brandy found a hidden note on her phone: “I show people what they want to see, but behind the social media life, no one knows the real me and how much trouble I go through to make sure everyone is okay , even though I’m not.”

Brandy, who is a teacher, believes people should know more about the technology they use every day. “In the low-income black community where I teach, parents are not adequately educated about any technology,” she said. “We thought we were two educated people. I want to teach parents first and then students: what is an algorithm? What do these sites do?” Toney said, “How on earth could this happen? How can humans develop something like an algorithm that trumps parental love? How can a machine do more for her than for us?”

Some lawsuits currently pending claim that the content that social media algorithms push into users’ feeds is influenced by race. “JAJ has no interest in guns or gangs, but Instagram and TikTok often direct him to gun and gang-themed content,” reads a legal complaint from a Black father of three. “These defendants are aware of the algorithmic discrimination in their products, yet continue to allow those products to disproportionately push violent and sexual content to African American users.” When I told Brandy that suicide among Black youth is rapidly increasing, she said she suspected suicide among Black youth had previously been underreported. “People get shocked when they see it’s a black family,” she said. “But it’s not your poor families anymore, it’s not your rich families – it can attack anyone.” Her desire to downplay race seems to reflect a concern that Englyn’s blackness could make other groups feel distant from her plight. Yet at the end of our conversation, Toney made a provocative historical comparison. “Zuckerberg is the new ‘mass,’” he said. “He estimated the lifetime value of a teenager at two hundred and seventy dollars. The price of a slave in 1770 was two hundred and sixty dollars.”

Beeban Kidron, a British filmmaker who sits in the House of Lords, runs a foundation dedicated to protecting children online. When I met her at the Houses of Parliament, she told me that her crusade had accelerated after the suicide, in 2017, of a fourteen-year-old Londoner named Molly Russell, who had viewed and saved thousands of posts about depression. and suicide. Two years later, her father launched a campaign in her name and appeared in a BBC video (“Instagram ‘helped kill my Daughter’”). Shortly afterwards, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published assurances that the platform was committed to ‘protecting the most vulnerable’, and the platform began removing millions of images linked to suicide and self-harm.

The official responsible for an inquest into Molly’s death ordered Meta, WhatsApp, Snap, Pinterest and Twitter to provide data from her accounts. “When it was first shown in the coroner’s court, there was shock and awe in the room,” Kidron told me. “People in tears, including the press gallery, who had been following this issue for years. No one understood the bombing.”

The investigation found that social media platforms were partly responsible for Molly’s death. The presiding officer concluded that Molly was so influenced by what she saw online that her death was not actually suicide, but rather “an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.”

Material from Molly’s research was presented to British lawmakers as they considered legislation, and last year they passed the Online Safety Act, which imposes strict requirements on the content regulation of digital platforms. Failure to comply can result in fines of eighteen million pounds or ten percent of a company’s annual global turnover, whichever is higher. Kidron believes that social media companies have long realized that this kind of regulation was coming and rushed to make a profit while they could. As we sat in Parliament, she said angrily: ‘Those bastards are making money off the backs of children, and the collateral damage of those enormous fortunes is sometimes literally killing those children. And they won’t change it without people sitting in buildings like this and telling them to do so.”