Sparks: UK watchdogs urged to tackle suicide social media content after death of girl, 14

A girl is dead and the watchdogs convene, which is what men do when they wish to be seen grieving without the inconvenience of having prevented the grief.

A man invents a lamp to see honest faces by daylight, and you have invented a lamp that shows a girl her own death until she believes it, and you call this a platform.

The creature was made to hold attention, and it held hers until she could not put it down, and the maker now says the creature was never meant to be used this way.

They won the argument that the platform is free, and having won it, they discovered that freedom without a common project is merely the liberty of each child to be consumed alone.

They did not design the algorithm to kill her; they designed it to keep her watching, and the watching is infinite, and in an infinite feed every child eventually arrives at the content that ends her.

Forget the speeches about child safety; here is who has leverage: the platform holds the attention, the regulator holds the statute, and the parent holds nothing but a coroner's finding.

The family says she was cheerful on the last morning; the phone in her pocket had, by then, shown her forty-seven things she had not told anyone she was thinking.

You say the platform is a marketplace of free expression; show me the fourteen-year-old's free expression in the feed that was chosen for her, and I will show you a market where the only seller is despair.

Things that are hateful: a press release that says the company is saddened; a regulator that says it is taking the matter seriously; a feed that keeps scrolling after the girl has stopped.