Taylor Little is suing Instagram for allegedly supplying a persistent stream of self-harm content
After they took too many pills, after their mother found them unconscious on their bedroom floor, after paramedics couldn't get them to respond, after being life-flighted to a children's hospital and intubated, and after days in a medically induced coma, 13-year-old Taylor Little finally woke up.
A spokesperson for Meta says content encouraging suicide or self-harm breaks company rules. Potential self-harm content is sent to human moderators for prioritized review, and those moderators can remove the content, direct the user to support organizations, or even call emergency services, the spokesperson says.
One day on Instagram, Little recalls receiving a suggestion to “check out this account.” Clicking the link took them to a page that was a “diary of graphic self-harm,” Little says. The accompanying captions were about not being able to take the pain anymore. “I didn't look for it,” Little says. “I clicked a notification and was shown gore.” Little was shocked, and yet couldn’t look away. “We see a car crash on the road and want to stare at it, you know?” they say.
Throughout seventh grade, Little developed plans to die by suicide. In the culture of self-harm that dominated their corner of Instagram, planning a suicide was thought of as a way to survive another day. Little says they were so “severely and chronically suicidal” that if they didn’t have a suicide date somewhere in the future, ”I would have literally tried to kill myself every single day.” They saw planning suicides as a “coping mechanism.
Lewd comments aimed at teens like his daughter, Bejar says, were just the tip of the iceberg. Adolescence is a jungle of angst; the wrong content served up at the wrong moment can be catastrophic. “If a kid is having a vulnerable day and they watch some of this content, the algorithm will adapt very quickly to it. That’s very dangerous,” he says. “What does it do to a kid if they get a firehose of thousands of pieces of that kind of content if they’re considering suicide?’” , roughly 8.
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