UK watchdogs urged to ban suicide content after teen death
The Librarian Who Never Sleeps
Somewhere in Norfolk there is a bedroom with a charger still plugged into the wall by the bed, the cable trailing to where a phone used to lie face-down at two in the morning.* The phone has presumably been taken away now, by someone with a clipboard and a gentle voice, because that is what happens afterwards. Afterwards is the one part of the system that is very well staffed.
*Nobody designs a bedroom to be the loneliest room in the house. It becomes one when everyone else is asleep and one thing is still awake and paying attention.
The girl was fourteen. The name in the reports is Adriana Retyte. Last week the death was linked to suicide-related material she had been shown on TikTok, and now there are calls for UK watchdogs to crack down on such content. This is the correct response, in the way that it is correct to shout at a river after it has flooded. The difficulty is that the watchdogs have been built to inspect the water one bucket at a time, and the river does not care about buckets.
Consider how the thing is regulated. A regulator looks at an item of content and asks whether it is harmful. This is a sensible question for a newspaper, which prints a page and is done with it. It is a nearly useless question for a feed, because a feed is not a pile of pages. It is a sequence. A single video about despair, watched once, may be harmless, or even a lifeline (some of these clips are made by people who survived and want to say so). The same video, served as the fortieth in a row to the same child at the same hour, is a different object entirely, though not one pixel of it has changed. The harm lives in the order, the repetition, the next, and the next is precisely the part that no rulebook written for items can see.**
**It is a little like fining a library for stocking a sad book, while ignoring the librarian who has noticed you liked one sad book and is now standing at your elbow every night with a trolley.
It should be said, because it is true and because the families deserve accuracy rather than satisfying villains, that nothing reported so far shows anyone at TikTok sat down and decided to show a child this. A recommendation system does what it was shaped to do, which is to notice what holds a person’s gaze and supply more of it. One inference is that engagement was valued above welfare, and that the machine learned the lesson perfectly. Another plausible explanation is duller and worse: that nobody asked the question at all, because the people measuring success were measuring minutes, and despair, it turns out, is very good for minutes. Either way the outcome arrives at the same bedside.
The strongest objection to a crackdown deserves a fair hearing. Strip out everything mentioning suicide, its defenders say, and you also delete the recovery stories, the helpline videos, the teenager explaining at length how she got through a bad winter; you punish the vulnerable for seeking company, and you hand the subject back to the dark corners where nobody moderates anything. They are right. A censor with a big enough broom sweeps the doctors out with the disease. But the objection is aimed at the wrong target. The problem was never that such material exists. The problem is that something kept choosing it, for one child, over and over, with a diligence no parent, teacher or social worker in Norfolk could afford to match, because they have jobs and sleep and other children. Regulate the choosing, and most of the free-speech worry dissolves, since nobody has a right to be fed the same grief forty times by a machine.
There is a peculiar arrangement here that deserves a moment of quiet admiration. The only entity in this story that was giving a fourteen-year-old its complete, unwavering, round-the-clock attention was software, and it was paying attention in order to keep her looking. Everyone else was busy. The watchdogs will now convene, and there will be consultations, and a framework, and a review of the framework, which is how institutions show that they are listening, at a speed set by themselves.
Meanwhile, tonight, in some other house, a phone lies face-down on a duvet, its screen lighting the ceiling in small blue pulses, and something patient behind the glass is already deciding what she ought to see next.
If you are struggling, Samaritans can be reached free in the UK and Ireland on 116 123, any hour of the day or night.