UK watchdogs urged to ban suicide content after teen death
The Feed That No One Made
Look at how this was made. The quality, or the lack of it, tells us something the policy debate is not discussing. When a child of fourteen in Norfolk scrolls through an endless column of short films, each one arriving a moment after the last, the thing in front of that child is not a heap of videos. It is an arrangement. Someone, or something, decided what came next. That sequence is the made object, as surely as a cathedral’s west front is a made object, and like any made object it bears the marks of the conditions under which it was produced.
So we must look at the arrangement itself. In a good bookshop the bookseller looks up when a girl of fourteen approaches the counter. That glance holds a whole judgement: her age, her manner, whether she lingers too long over one shelf. The judgement may be clumsy, but a mind is present at the moment of choosing. In the feed that reached Adriana Retyte, there was, as far as we can tell from what has been reported, no such glance at the moment of choosing. There was a calculation of what would hold attention, executed at a speed no human attention could follow, and offered to a child as though it were the same offering made to anyone.
The defence of the platform deserves to be stated at its strongest, because it is not foolish. TikTok carries more films in a day than any company of inspectors could watch in a lifetime. No bookseller could stand at that counter. Whatever is harmful is contrary to its rules and removed when it is found, and the failures, however terrible, are the residue of an impossible task performed imperfectly. On this view the watchdogs should demand faster removal and better filters, and the matter is one of efficiency.
But observe what that defence concedes. It says the thing was built at a scale where care at the moment of choosing became impossible, and it offers that impossibility as an excuse rather than as a confession. A joiner who builds a staircase too long to be inspected has not been defeated by the staircase; the joiner chose its length. The scale of the feed was not weather. It was a decision, taken somewhere upstream of every child who would stand on those stairs, that reach mattered more than the possibility of looking. I cannot say from the facts before me who took that decision or why; it may have been ambition, it may have been the ordinary drift of competition, in which each firm builds larger because its rival did. Either way the quality of the made thing records the choice.
And here is the point the debate passes over. The calls now made in the UK are mostly calls about content: remove this film, ban that category. Content is the stone. The sequence is the building. A single film about despair, met once and set in its place by a parent, a teacher, a friend, is a different object from twenty such films arriving in succession, each confirming the last, offered at the hour when a child is alone with a lit screen. Nobody need have authored the second object for it to exist. That is precisely its character: it is ornament stamped by a machine, smooth and tireless and wholly without the irregularity that would prove a mind had paused over it. We do not know, and should not pretend to know, what passed through one girl’s thoughts last week, nor how many other sorrows met in that room. We know only what kind of thing was placed before her, and how it was made.
A regulator who inspects only the stones will always be late, because new stones arrive faster than inspectors can lift them. A regulator who asks how the building is designed, what it is built to reward, whether its makers can say, for a given child, why this film followed that one, is asking a question of workmanship. It is the question every honest craft has always had to answer: can you account for what you made?
Somewhere in Norfolk there is a bedroom with a phone on the bedside table, its screen dark now. If it were woken, it would begin again at once, smooth and attentive and wholly unattending, ready to offer the next thing to whoever picks it up.
If this subject touches you closely: in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached any time, free, on 116 123.