Youth Online Harms Prevention & Awareness

Alex had a keen intellect, mischievous humor, radiant spirit and a loving heart.  He was active in theater, band, his church youth group and Boy Scouts.  He had good grades and no history of mental health issues.  Yet, when he was 17 years old, he was influenced online to die by suicide after a break-up. 

It has taken nearly 8 years and the insights from former Meta/FB employees Arturo Bejar, Frances Haugen, Kelly Stonelake, & Sarah Wynn Williams) and authors (Tim Hwang, Ashley Mears, Adam Alter) to piece together a probable scenario concerning what happened online in Alex's last 3 days:
💔 Break-up - went online to private IG account on smartphone
💔 Platform data collection enabling real-time advertising bidding (Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis) signal that Alex is depressed.
💔 First pro-suicide posts sent by IG's algorithm into Alex's feed. They do not include gore, so meet IG's community standards, not taken down, continued to be promoted by IGs algorithm. Alex unconsciously lingers on these posts.
💔 "Cringe Content" (e.g. posts of shrouded corpses) rewarded by platform algorithms = more $$/increased reach, see Professor Ashley Mears: Making Cringe Content.

💔  IG's addictive technology keeps him online, see Irresistible by Adam Alter.
💔 3 days of being pummeled by "you'll never find love/another girlfriend" posts interspersed with non-gory, pro-suicide posts, combined with cyberbullying on another platform, overwhelm Alex - his youthful, impulsive brain just wanted the pain to stop-so he did the thing that was influenced to do - take his own life.
 

Laura Marquez-Garrett reminded me that this all really started when I got him his first smartphone for Christmas 10 months before his death. It wasn't until she asked about the changes in his behavior that I put together his smartphone use with his lack of sleep, changes in his personality and more oppositional relationship with me in the months before he died.
 

My husband and I thought we did everything right. We had family dinner together (no smartphones) in the evenings that Alex did not have after-school activities. I followed his public FB and IG accounts, not realizing that he had a separate, private IG that he only accessed on his smartphone. We had a family desktop computer, located in a room that we all used. We talked about what he was seeing online (but, in the end, we learned about his negative online experiences in his suicide note).
 

We knew he was upset about the break-up, but we never thought his online activities would influence him to take his life.

It happened to our family, it can happen to yours.

The purpose of Social Media Harms is to spread awareness about the many online harms affecting youth today.  To submit peer-reviewed articles that document the externalities created by social media or other online platform use, please contact info@socialmediaharms.org.