Instagram Vows To Remove All Graphic Self-Harm Images From Site (bbc.com)

All graphic images of self-harm will be removed from Instagram, the head of the social media platform has told the BBC. From a report: The move comes after the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017, said Instagram had "helped kill" his daughter. Molly's family found she had been viewing graphic images of self-harm on the site prior to her death. Adam Mosseri said Instagram was trying to balance "the need to act now and the need to act responsibly". He added the site was "not where we need to be on the issues of self-harm and suicide". When asked by the BBC's Angus Crawford when the images would be removed, Mr Mosseri replied: "As quickly as we can, responsibly." Molly's father Ian Russell welcomed Instagram's commitment and said he hoped they would act swiftly to implement their plans.

Comments

If you have kids...

[sycodon]

...keep them off social media.

Umm, yeah

[Ol Olsoc]

This unfortunate young lady was not killed over depression or some other personal problem, it was because she looked at some pictures on instagram. Hold on here.

I can sympathize with her family, what a sad experience.

But here is the big problem if you are going to sanitize Instagram or other Social media because you are somehow responsible for killing people with depression or mental illness.

Depressed people often see happy people, and become angry or more depressed. Might an image of a happy person be the trigger for them finally killing themselves? So Perhaps Instagram needs to police and eliminate images of people having a good time because if they don't, they murdered someone.

This policing is showing a remarkable misunderstanding of depression and mental illness.

Re:Umm, yeah

[Obfuscant]

This policing is showing a remarkable misunderstanding of depression and mental illness.

But it shows a remarkable understanding of how they'll look to a jury when the parents sue. Big bad company hurt innocent kid, did nothing to prevent it from happening to another kid.

Re:Umm, yeah

[sjames]

I wonder how many troubled teens have looked at similar pictures on Instagram and then said to themselves "What the hell was I thinking" and then quietly didn't do anything unfortunate.

Re:Umm, yeah

[Ol Olsoc]

One of the most basic, and effective, techniques of persuasion is demonstrating that others have done it.

When someone is contemplating suicide, being exposed to stories of people committing suicide will strengthen their resolve to do so. You sound like someone who should be educated enough to know this.

So skimming through such images probably did not make her depressed, but it probably did help push her over the edge.

I have no doubt she was depressed. It is rather unfortunate that her parents, who presumably see her every day, seemed to not notice the problem.

This is just another version of the "Helter Skelter" defense, or Judas Priest being sued because two teenagers https://www.nytimes.com/1990/0... or akid killing himeself, and aomehow Ozzy Ozbourne was responsible. https://www.history.com/this-d... .

Yes, I am educated. But Judas Priest, or Ozzy Ozbourne, or Instagram didn't cause those people to commit suicide, and the Beatles didn't make Charles Manson and his followers kill Sharon Tate and the others. They didn't, even if the people looked at images or listened to music.

I am educated enough to understand that people in grieving might very often look for some blame target, especially if they might have had something to do with the original problem or were in denial of it.

People commit suicide without looking at images on Instagram, or listen to Judas Priest or Black Sabbath music. Why do they do this? Often because they are depressed. No need for those three bogeymen.

I might give the concept a little more credence if normal person was driven to suicide. But that's almost certainly never going to be shown.

Want a better idea? How about in the interests of preventing more suicides in young teens, the parents interview with psychologists to see what they might have missed, or ignored, or just wrote off to "a phase". Then compiling everything to see what they might make sense of. One thing is for certain. These people had a daughter with a mental illness, a daughter who was very likely to kill herself even is she never looked at instagram. I graduated high school long before the internet, and we had some folks who committed suicide. Blaming outside things for internal family issues will seldom solve anything. And its so much better if parents can quietly get their troubled offspring good treatment than going through official channels. And we do want less teenagers to be killing themselves, wouldn't you agree?

Re:Umm, yeah

[Ol Olsoc]

Social media has been shown to make people with depression suffer more.

I've seen the studies. They are plausible.

All they see is a curated view of everyone they know having a great time. They look at their own life and see everything, not just the good stuff. The bad stuff overshadows the good. They get the impression than everyone else's life is amazing and theirs is all shit.

Then you've got the correlation between an increasing trend in youth suicide rates and an increase in social media use.

Although in this case, she was not perusing happy pictures, but people doing harm to themselves.

But you do bring up some interesting stuff. Depression is a real issue, apparently largely among women, who are big users of social media. Daytime TV is full of new depression meds, and all aimed at women. I think that your second paragraph is exactly the problem. I think the ladies have been brought up with the concept that they can have it all, including maximum happieness. This would a state just shy of giddiness. Or even giddiness.

But that doesn't happen, and it makes them sad and thinking they might have done something wrong. Because all their friends are sooooo happy. So they do the same thing, Happy, happy, happy. But they aren't because they think something is missing. So do their friends. So they turn to the anti-depressants, which as a maintenance drug, Pharma is only too happy to oblige.

I am not certain, because I havent seen the data, but I'm not certain this is clinical depression, more a matter of "I'm not as happy as they told me I would be - and I've done all the right things, and my friends are all happy - so there must be something wrong with me!"

So they get drugged up, instead of understanding that you aren't giddyhappy all the time, that sometimes contentment is more the sign of a happy life.

I don't think - I hope - that these ladies aren't suicidal though.

Re:Umm, yeah

[sjames]

That likely happens as well. That's what makes this so very far from a no-brainer. We must also consider the effects when a troubled teen reaches out for connections and possibly cries for help and gets summarily deleted (effectively told "shut up, you're unacceptable!").

Deleting the images feels like a positive step on first blush, but I think it requires a good bit of thought and research to make sure it's not doing more harm than good. It's a hard problem and I don't claim to have all the answers.

... good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids tend to be social creatures by nature, and have a lot more time to get around your rules than you have to enforce them. Much more valuable is to actually listen to your kids, particularly pre-teens and teens. Like shut up for 15 minutes and let them talk and answer with things like "why" and "what caused that" and shut your mouth when you want to say "that's stupid". Yes, it takes more maturity than they have, but you be the adult.

Re:... good luck

[alvinrod]

Kids tend to be social creatures by nature

Then let them go out and spend time with their friends instead of being on social media.

I think that humans are only about as adapted to coping with social media as they are life on Mars.

post hoc ergo propter hoc

[SuricouRaven]

...

Wow, that could be a lot of images banned.

[bob4u2c]

So that means no images with someone who's used Botox, no images of someone drunk, no images of someone smoking, no images of someone with a cast on, no images of any kind of piercings, I could go on.

When you throw out a generic term like "self harm" your going to exclude a lot more stuff than you ever intended. For example, I might classify a tattoo as self harm, some might not. Pretty soon all we end up with is cute cat pictures playing with yarn because, awwwwe.

Stop trying to bubble wrap the world. My bigger concern would have been that my child was seeking out self harm images in the first place.

Re:Hmm

[serviscope_minor]

WTF is with all the transphobia on here recently.

Wrong way round?

[jythie]

Hrm.

The bulk of the cutters and other-self harm people I've known over the years did so, in part, out of a need for agency and control over their own body. Perhaps I am being unfair, but every time I hear a parent complain about 'my kids learned cutting from XYZ and then kill themselves', I wonder just how abusive the parent was and now they are trying to blame someone else.

Shared Psychosis

[MrKaos]

Social media is starting to look like some sort of shared psychosis where people forget how to interact with other people and are only learning to interact with themselves. Especially because they only get attention in the form of likes which causes them to do ever more extreme things to get attention. This can't be a good thing for mental health.

I'm completely against censorship though because when people attempt to control the flow of ideas they are assuming a dictatorial role which, in and of itself, imbues the censor with a sense of power that corrupts them no matter how pure their intentions or morals are. Communism and fascism has shown us just how bad this can become.

So whilst picture of self harm are extreme images, that I personally would not like to view, they do serve as an indicator of the amount of mental sickness we have in society. In reality the images are people screaming for help that warns others and the censor becomes the enabler that allows the shared psychosis to go unchallenged in society.

This is the heavy burden of responsibility we all share for maintaining free speech no matter how ugly it becomes because the people who do this are the "canary in a cage" warning us that our society has a problem.