The Mirror talks to bereaved dad Ian Russell ahead of a documentary looking into the death of his daughter, Molly vs THE MACHINES, which airs on Thursday on Channel 4
When Ian Russell locked his front door at night, he believed his daughter Molly would be safe upstairs.
What the dad did not know was that sinister social media algorithms were bombarding the 14-year-old with endless streams of harmful material in her bedroom. In November 2017, the dark online world would overwhelm Molly and lead her to take her own life.
On Thursday, a powerful documentary into her life and death lays out how tech firms’ unstoppable algorithms swamped the vulnerable teen with thousands of posts relating to suicide, self-harm and depression.
“I have no doubt that these companies helped kill my daughter,” Mr Russell says in the film, Molly vs THE MACHINES, which airs on Thursday, March 5 at 9pm on Channel 4.
READ MORE: Dad of girl, 14, who took own life gives powerful warning over social media ban
Viewers are taken into a recreation of Molly’s room, in Harrow, north London, where horse posters decorate the walls, beside a dressing table and a desk. The disturbing power of algorithms is depicted as a shadowy presence dangerously creeping into the lone teen’s private space.
In an interview with The Mirror, bereaved dad Mr Russell said: “In the offline world, we take steps to protect ourselves. We have front doors that lock and we make sure they’re locked before we go to bed at night. But if you have a child and you have provided a smartphone for that child and that smartphone is with them in their bedroom overnight, there’s a break in that security. There’s a window to the outside world and by various forms, it’s possible that harmful content could be being provided to the child.”
When the family discovered Molly’s social media after her death, they found a “hidden side” to Molly. Mr Russell said: “It was shocking, because it was so unlike the Molly we knew. Molly died feeling desperate… She thought she was a hopeless case and there was no way that it could get better.
“And worse than anything she – the most adorable and lovely of people – thought she was a burden to those that she knew. Where did those feelings come from? They came from the content that she saw on her phone.”
Mr Russell hopes the documentary will show parents that the harms that led to Molly’s death were preventable – and must be stopped to save other children’s lives. “I think what I’d like people to take away is that these harms are preventable,” he said.
“Social media existed before engagement-based algorithms fed us the content that they thought we wanted to see more of or keep us on the platform. So deaths like Molly’s are preventable. It’s not inevitable that tech is harmful.”
In 2022, a landmark inquest into Molly’s death, which was not allowed to be filmed, found online harms “contributed to her death in a more than minimal way”. It heard that Molly interacted with more than 2,000 harmful posts on Instagram in the final six months of her life alone.
Mr Russell said: “That never-ending stream of content affected my mood when I saw it. It affected the expert witness to the inquest, who said he’d had trouble sleeping after viewing some of the content that Molly had seen. It affected everyone in the courtroom who saw it.”
Actors in the documentary bring the coroner’s court to life, re-enacting the first time a senior executive from Meta, which owns Instagram, gave evidence under oath in a court in the UK.
An actress playing Meta’s Elizabeth Lagone insists posts described as “encouraging” suicide or self-harm were safe. The documentary also shows Molly’s friends, who are now in their early twenties, who say they had no idea of the world their pal was consumed by and admit it could’ve been any of them in her position.
Their frustration at the lack of action from tech giants to make the online world safer since their friend’s death is poignant, with one saying: “How many Mollys does it have to take for them to actually realise that this is wrong?”
Asked what he thinks of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires, Mr Russell questions whether they have any “human heart left in them”. “I just can’t see how the decisions they’ve made in running their hugely profitable platforms have any human heart left in them,” he said. “I think it’s quite clear that they really do put profit before safety and as time goes on, that becomes clearer and clearer.”
He said social media firms promised to do better after Molly’s story broke but that research from the Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up by the family in her name, shows harmful content can still be found online. “I’ve learned not to judge them by their words because their words can sound quite promising, but to judge them by their actions,” said Mr Russell, who was wearing an MRF bracelet.
In the UK, he said a consultation launched by the Government to gather evidence on online harms is “really important”. He has set himself apart from some other bereaved parents by speaking out against a social media ban for under 16s.
He believes it is an easy solution that creates a “sense of false safety” and warns that early evidence from Australia’s ban suggests young people are migrating to other platforms to “beat the ban”. “We have to move beyond the ban to something that’s more stringent, more effective,” he said.
He added that the Online Safety Act means there is a “great foundation” on which to build in the UK, adding: “We can make change, and we can prevent those platforms purveying the harm that they still purvey today to young people. We shouldn’t lose hope.”