Teen Commits Suicide After Instagram Poll | Hacker News Reader

Teen Commits Suicide After Instagram Poll

digit.fyi

32 pointsdigighoul18 comments

One thing I've noticed HN gets right is requiring a basic standard of civility, and it seems like that idea gets lost in the discussion around social media. It's understandable that Instagram et al want to get rid of hate speech, but "the grind of you suck, you're lying, you're stupid"* is a problem orders of magnitude larger because it encompasses users in general.

And, yeah, if you have an environment where it's normal to be civil and not take cheap shots at people, "you should kill yourself" may not be entirely prevented, but it would probably be unusual enough that she wouldn't have seen 70% of her peers telling her that.

* quoting Anita Sarkeesian from memory

If I saw this poll I would assume it was a joke. Does the law have no understanding of irony? Serious question for those who might know (I know this is Malaysia so things are different).

Children are still figuring things out, and are extremely sensitive to feedback from peers. I wouldn't assume this was a joke, and, even if it was (or a ploy for attention, or playing with being dramatic, or whatever), negative peer feedback could turn it serious.

Also, it's not like certain social media companies don't know this about children, and they've published research on exploiting that for their own manipulative purposes.

Right, but presumably the people voting on this poll are kids too, so it's hard for them to bring the same attitude to the situation.

Based on her response, do you think it was a joke to her? Can you be absolved of slander or inciting riots if you say you were just kidding?

Obviously not. Can you be absolved if you didn't think you'd be taken seriously? That's the question, isn't it? Many laws use language like "knowingly" and "purposefully" to signify that intention plays a role.

Is there any reason why answering to a question through a social network would be considered differently than if they were saying the same thing personally in a group?

I'm sad for the commenter that wrote that he considers it as a joke: I make sure whenever I read or hear about somebody being in depression I take it seriously.

The statements from IG execs are pretty robotic, aren't they.

Safe and Supported (tm)

Thoughts and Prayers (tm)

If I were writing or talking with care and attention specifically about this incident (as opposed to regurgitating a talking point/slogan) I might use the word supported, as in "we want our users to feel supported." (Better, I might actually eschew the weak and sniveling passive voice and say "we want to support our users" or even better yet, "we support our users." But obviously it's hard to be that direct and simple when you also exploit users.) Anyway, I would probably not spontaneously say "safe and supported," since she herself was the one who rejected safety. Even if (long shot) I decided to include the tangential idea of safety, I might say "supported and safe."

So yeah, to me, the phrase was jarring enough the first time I read it, but then a different person says the exact same phrase? It's like an assembly line. This poor girl is being treated as a "case" and callously lumped in with who-knows what other "cases" that fall under what's starting to sound like a branded initiative.

"Thank you for your inquiry regarding

  girl commits suicide after Instagram poll

Our thoughts and prayers and so on. Press 1 for the Safe and Supported team."

In fairness, if I were an IG exec and this horrified me and I couldn't sleep and was digging into it and demanding answers from my people and all that drama...

I'd still give a safe, bland quote to the press.

Maybe so. It just seems sometimes like humans have become too good at remaking ourselves in the image of our machines.

Not to trivialize her tragic death but this is one hell of an object lesson in letting a study run to completion before interpreting your data (if IG is to be believed, I guess): "Police say, at the time of her death, 69% voted for her to die. However, Instagram insists that the poll, which lasted 24-hours, ended with 88% of her followers choosing ‘L’."

In the next sentence

>District police chief Aidil Bolhassan concedes the results may have changed during the time the poll was active as more people learned of her death.

What's funny is that Instagram have to defend themselves from this nonsense.

What's funny is denying that social media use by teenagers is more damaging to their health than, say, smoking cigarettes.

But less damaging than, say, keeping them socially isolated.

As the article touches on, this seems symptomatic of two larger-scale issues - while the poll results almost certainly acted as a final straw, as it were, it is hard to imagine the same circumstances arising without the Internet's combination of dehumanization (due to pseudonymity) and echo/amplifying effects; it is far more difficult to escape a negative headspace when even on the best days you are subject to a barrage of topics you looked up on the worst - even if the topics themselves are mundane, mental associations are not to be underestimated, and it's all too easy to slip backwards.

I don't know if it's possible to fix these in current social network designs - even when linked to your actual identity, Facebook has shown a screen can still be barrier enough to encourage all sorts of awful, while the trend in tracking and topic repetition (echochamber) has only been increasing.

I hope we figure it out before the Internet gets too evil.

>Police say, at the time of her death, 69% voted for her to die. However, Instagram insists that the poll, which lasted 24-hours, ended with 88% of her followers choosing ‘L’.

I don't see the context that explains that D = death and L = life. Maybe D could have stood for Dark and L for Light?

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