A 14-year-old British girl died of self-harm while suffering from “adverse effects of online content,” a coroner said Friday in a case that has put the spotlight on social media companies.
Andrew Walker, sentencing at North London Coroners Court, said that Molly Russell had been “exposed to material which has affected her in a negative way and, moreover, what started as depression turned into a more had become a major depressive disorder,” Andrew Walker ruled at North London Coroners’ Court.
He said the young man “died of self-harm during depression”, but added that it would not be “safe” to conclude it was suicide.
Walker said some of the material he saw was “particularly graphic” and “normalized his condition”.
Russell, from Harrow, north-west London, died in November 2017, prompting his family to launch a campaign to highlight the dangers of social media.
“So many other people are affected in the same way right now,” her father Ian Russell said after the verdict.
“At this point, I just want to say that no matter how dark it seems, there is always hope.
“I hope this will be an important step in bringing much-needed change,” he added.
The week-long hearing became heated when the family’s attorney, Oliver Sanders, took an Instagram executive to task.
A visibly angry Sanders asked Elizabeth Lagon, head of health and wellness at Instagram’s parent company Metta, why the platform allowed children to use it when they “allowed people to put potentially harmful content on it.” was giving”.
“You’re not a parent, you’re just a business in America. You have no right to do that. The kids who are opening these accounts don’t have the capacity to consent,” he said.
Lagone apologized after being shown the footage, which Russell saw, which “violated our policies”.
The inquest heard that Russell saved, shared or liked 16,300 posts on Instagram in the six months before her death, 2100 of which were related to depression, self-harm or suicide.
Children’s charity the NSPCC said the decision “should be a turning point”.
“Tech companies must be held accountable when they don’t make children’s safety a top priority,” the charity tweeted.
“This should be a turning point,” he added, stressing that any delay in the government bill on online safety would be “incomprehensible to parents”.
