Online giants must do more to clean up the revolting sewer they’ve helped create

By Graham Grant

MASS murder live-streamed on Facebook is a concept so utterly abhorrent that it might have seemed over-the-top even for authors of dystopian fiction.

And yet the Christchurch mosque shootings which left scores dead last week were broadcast in real time on the social networking site for nearly 20 minutes.

In that short period, the video was copied and shared on other web platforms, such as Twitter and YouTube, and links to the sick film are still available online.

As a society, our retreat into the virtual realm of the internet is now so complete that many of us couldn’t envisage a life entirely devoid of social media participation.

But it can also be extremely harmful, even lethal, to the extent that MPs are now calling for addiction to Facebook and Instagram to be officially classified as a disease.

Facebook accounts document a kind of counterfeit existence, one that is carefully shorn of inconvenient flaws, and at its most innocuous is replete with videos of new babies and skateboarding cats.

But that can also bring pressure to copy mythical perfection, and the real lives of those behind the airbrushed profiles can be sad and desperate, as evidenced by the apparent suicide of Mike Thalassitis.

The 26-year-old, a former contestant on the ITV reality show Love Island, was found dead in woods in Essex on Saturday, weeks after the unexplained death of Sophie Gradon, 32, who also appeared on the show in 2016 and was discovered dead at her home in June last year.

The deaths prompted concern about the mental health aftercare offered by the programme-makers, but Mr Thalassitis’s Twitter page also showed his attempts to sustain his supposedly ‘celebrity’ lifestyle.

These brief flirtations with fame collapse under the crushing weight of the rather more pedestrian lives to which the majority of these young people return, feeling that they must perpetuate the illusion of showbiz success.

Then there is the tragedy of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life after viewing graphic images on Instagram that glamorised self-harm.

Before her death, she had written a suicide note in which she told her parents and two sisters: ‘I’m sorry. I did this because of me.’

MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing are now calling for new regulations on social networking companies, and want them in place within seven months.

The MPs have produced a report showing the average 14-year-old is now using social media for three to four hours a day, while 27 per cent of youngsters have symptoms of mental health problems – compared to 12 per cent of those who do not use social media.

The social media firms, determined to defy any attempt to categorise them as ‘publishers’, are now ploughing some of their billions into slick PR and charm offensives, albeit with variable results.

Former deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg began his new job spinning for Facebook by claiming in January that it had been a force for good that has helped troubled young people.

In a BBC interview, he was confronted with an array of gruesome material found on Facebook-owned Instagram – the corporation’s media editor, Amol Rajan, said they showed ‘slit wrists, smeared blood, [and] a girl cuddling a teddy bear with [the words] “This world is so cruel and I don’t want to see it any more”.’

While expressing his concern, the former Lib Dem leader also responded by saying that experts had advised that these ‘distressing images’ may help young people to ‘reach out for help’.

A curious and indeed highly dubious PR strategy, you might think, particularly for a politician who only three years ago had described Facebook’s ‘messianic Californian new-worldy-touchy-feely culture’ as ‘a little grating’.

‘Touchy-feely’ it may be, but a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation last year uncovered horrifying instances of the site’s moderators justifying a staggering refusal to clean up the site’s pages.

The exposé showed how employees defended the publication of videos of a child being battered senseless by adults, or of vicious fighting between two schoolchildren with one beaten to the ground and kicked.

One moderator told an undercover reporter that ‘if you start censoring too much then people lose interest in the platform…. It’s all about making money at the end of the day’.

Sir Nick’s billionaire boss Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire from MPs for refusing to give evidence to Parliament, although last month he did meet Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright, who warned him that the ‘era of self-regulation is coming to an end’.

How meaningful that self-regulation ever was is open to debate, in an industry which has avoided the strictures placed on the mainstream media and the printed Press.

That has led to utter lawlessness online, from sickening vitriol and death threats, much of it directed at female public figures, to an irreversible coarsening of political debate

Beyond the psychological impact on young minds – which is incalculable but likely to be highly corrosive over time – there is also a physical threat from paedophiles who infiltrate chatrooms and online games.

Police Scotland yesterday launched a campaign aimed at warning would-be offenders of the devastating consequences of attempting to ‘groom’ children, after highlighting a spike in online child sexual abuse.

These perversions have always existed, but the web has opened up a conduit allowing direct access to the bedrooms of countless children, whose activities on tablet devices and games consoles may be something of a mystery for less technologically literate parents.

The ‘dark web’ has made it easier than ever before to view and swap indecent images, and we know from court cases that people from all backgrounds and professions, however outwardly respectable, can be drawn into that twisted world.

Meanwhile drug-dealers in Scotland are brazenly using social media to sell chocolate Easter eggs laced with high-strength cannabis, with adverts posted on Instagram openly offering the illegal confectionery for sale – bearing a Wonka label ripped off from the sweet-maker in the classic Roald Dahl children’s novels.

Law enforcement is having to evolve to cope with the pace of change, but parents have never had to be more alert to the myriad dangers their children face just by logging onto the household Wi-Fi.

How many young people have been scarred, both literally and figuratively, by content that the web giants have failed to weed out, is unknowable, but it is also clear that the risk to their innocence, and indeed their lives, is growing.

The behemoth tech companies that have courted our political class so effectively for so long cannot be allowed to escape responsibility for policing the online sewer they have helped to create.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on March 19, 2019.