British justice questioned this Friday the role of the content that a teenager saw on social networks before committing suicide, after a process that relaunches the debate on the influence of these platforms and their algorithms.
Molly Russell, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in November 2017 when she was 14 years old.
In an attempt to understand her gesture, her relatives discovered that she had been exposed on social networks, mainly Instagram and Pinterest, to numerous contents evoking suicide, depression and self-harm.
A court proceeding called "quest"destined to determine the causes of his death, reached this conclusion on Friday in London, after ten days of hearing.
The contents seen by the young "they were not safe and should never have been accessible to a girl"Andrew Walker, in charge of the procedure, stated in his conclusions.
Instead of calling her death a suicide, he considered that the young woman "died due to an act of self-harm, while suffering from depression and the negative effects of content viewed on the internet".
The operation of the algorithms of social networks, which tend to offer users content similar to what they have previously seen, "It certainly had a negative effect on Molly."he insisted.
A law on "online security"designed to strike a balance between freedom of expression and the protection of users, particularly minors.