Sexual abuse and exploitation feature often in the allegations: A girl attempted suicide twice when she was eleven, having been contacted by men on Roblox and then Discord, one of whom inveigled her into sending explicit photographs on Snapchat, where photos disappear (though they can still be screenshotted). A boy was persuaded to send illicit pictures to a user, also via Snapchat, only for that person to send back a collage of the images as blackmail. One suit, citing a leaked Meta document in which an employee asserted that the People You May Know function had, in the past, “contributed up to 75% of all inappropriate adult-minor contact,” claims that, “incredibly, Meta made the decision to continue utilizing its user recommendation products regardless.” (Meta says it has developed technology to limit potentially suspicious accounts from interacting with teens.)
Bergman told me of a boy who had been deluged with TikTok videos telling him to jump in front of a train—which he did. Another young man, after a breakup, posted about his heartache and was sent videos telling him to blow his head off—which he did. “This is kids affirmatively being directed to suicidal content,” Bergman said. “It’s Orwellian. You can’t walk away from the bully. It’s like you’re running right into his fist.” Even parents who recognize social media as a problem can find themselves facing tragedy when they try to shield their children from it: “Sarah was extremely distraught after having her phone taking [sic] away and . . . thought that she could not live without Defendants’ social media products,” one 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 so vividly that you expect to see her entering the room, grinning, bubbly, and demanding. One of Englyn’s friends put a recording of her laughter into a Build-a-Bear plushie that she gave to Brandy and Toney; if you lean on it, as I did by accident, peals of hilarity break out. On the living-room sofa, there is a pillow printed with a snapshot taken on a trip to Destin, Florida. Englyn is hugging Brandy, and her face is alight with glee. A week after the picture was taken, she hanged herself.
As the youngest in a family of seven siblings, half siblings, and stepsiblings, Englyn was doted on, even spoiled. Because she loved travel, she and her parents would get in the car and Toney would say, “East or west or north or south?,” and they would set out, once making it as far as New Mexico. Toney loved to indulge his daughter, taking her for a manicure she suddenly wanted, or getting food late at night. Brandy tried to set limits, and cautioned her daughter, whose bearing was confident, even regal, that people in their community, the Black community, didn’t like anyone who came across as full of themselves.
On the last Saturday in August, 2020, Toney made soup for dinner, but Englyn didn’t have much. “Baby girl, you didn’t eat,” Toney said. “My soup wasn’t good?” He suggested they order pizza, and he and Brandy and Englyn sat up late, eating. At around half past ten, Englyn asked her parents if they wanted to watch a movie. “Oh, no, baby girl, we tired,” Toney said. Before she went upstairs, her parents said, as always, “Love you,” and she said, “Love you,” and kissed them both.
Later that night, the mother of a friend of Englyn’s who had been texting with her got in touch with Brandy, urging her to check on her. Toney and Brandy were surprised to find Englyn’s door locked. When they got 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 right there,” he told me as we stood in Englyn’s bedroom. She had used an extension cord to hang herself from a door hinge. “Seems like an eternity passed, and I get her down, and Brandy starts CPR.”
When paramedics arrived, they detected a pulse, and Englyn was placed on life support in the hospital. “And you just praying and praying and praying for nine days, vigils outside, just everything you can humanly, possibly do,” Toney said. On September 7th, the doctors advised the Robertses to discontinue life support. “You ask yourself, ‘What is she feeling? Is she feeling anything?,’ ” Toney remembered. He and Brandy were joined at the hospital by his mother and two priests, and everyone said their final farewells.
Of all the bedrooms of children lost to suicide that I visited during my reporting, Englyn’s was the most meticulously preserved: every pair of shoes in the same place she had kept them, the bed still made and occupied by a row of Teddy bears. “She had these socks on that night,” Toney said. “This is where I found her. See that box? She stood up on that box.” The box was just 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’d shown me, Englyn looks not just cheerful but joyous, exploding into laughter and song, yet she was taking pictures in which she was cutting herself and posting thoughts like “I’ve been feeling ugly lately.” After she turned fourteen, she posted a birthday photograph with the caption “Swipe to see my real shape”; the next picture showed a distortion of her figure. A longer post said, “One Day Ima Leave This World And Never Come Back, You Gone Cry When You See A Picture Of Me. . . . So You Need To Appreciate Me Before I’m Gone.”
Instagram’s algorithms had sent her increasingly troubling suicide content. In one post, a Black woman screamed, “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.
“It’s a podcast about me and my buddy discussing movies, but the catch is we also sorta joke around.”
Cartoon by Ellis Rosen
Brandy had often checked Englyn’s phone, looking for inappropriate photos or bad language; it never occurred to her to check the videos Instagram was recommending. After Englyn died, Toney and Brandy found a hidden note on her phone: “I show ppl what they want to see but behind the social media life nobody knows the real me and how much I struggle to make sure everyone’s good even though I’m not.”
Brandy, who is a teacher, thinks that people need to know more about the technology they use daily. “In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology,” she said. “We thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?” Toney said, “How in the hell could this happen? How could man develop such a thing as an algorithm that trumps the parents’ love? How could a machine mean more to her than us?”
Some of the lawsuits currently pending allege that the content social-media algorithms push to users’ feeds is influenced by race. “J.A.J. has no interest in guns or gangs, yet Instagram and TikTok would often direct him to gun and gang-themed content,” a legal complaint from a Black father of three reads. “These defendants know of the algorithmic discrimination in their products, yet continue to allow those products to push disproportionately violent and sexual content to African American users.” When I mentioned to Brandy that suicide is rising rapidly among Black youths, she said she suspected that Black suicide had previously been under-reported. “People do get shocked when they see it’s a Black family,” she said. “But it’s not your poor families anymore, not your rich families—it can attack anybody.” Her desire to downplay race seems to reflect a concern that Englyn’s Blackness might allow other groups to feel distant from her plight. Still, at the end of our conversation, Toney drew a provocative historical comparison. “Zuckerberg is the new ‘massa,’ ” he said. “He put the lifetime value of a teen-ager at two hundred seventy dollars. The price of a slave in 1770 was two hundred 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 with her, in the Houses of Parliament, she told me that her crusade had gained momentum 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 thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published assurances that the platform was determined “to protect the most vulnerable,” and the platform began to delete millions of images related to suicide and self-harm.
The official in charge of a judicial investigation 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 had understood the bombardment.”
The investigation found social-media platforms partially responsible for Molly’s death. The presiding official concluded that Molly had been so influenced by what she saw online that her death was not truly suicide but rather “an act of self harm whilst suffering depression and the negative effects of on-line content.”
Material from Molly’s inquest was presented to British lawmakers as they considered legislation, and last year they passed the Online Safety Act, which imposes stringent content-regulation requirements on digital platforms. Failure to comply can result in fines of either eighteen million pounds or ten per cent of a company’s annual global revenue, whichever is greater. Kidron believes that social-media companies have long realized that this kind of regulation would come and have been rushing to profit while they could. As we sat in Parliament, she fumed, “Those bastards are making money on the backs of children, and the collateral damage of those vast fortunes is sometimes, literally, the life of those children. And they won’t change it without people sitting in buildings like this and telling them they’ve got to.”
