The family of Molly Russell, the 14-year-old who killed herself in 2017 after viewing harmful content online, have expressed frustration at the time taken by Meta to disclose data relevant to her death, a coroner has heard.
Oliver Sanders QC, representing Molly’s family, told a pre-inquest review: “If I could just put on record the immense frustration and disappointment of the family at the fact that we’re conducting this process now when it could and should have been conducted two years ago.”
He said Molly’s father, Ian, needed a chance to review all the Instagram posts Molly interacted with before he could submit a witness statement to the inquest.
Molly, from Harrow, north-west London, viewed an extensive volume of material, including some linked to anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide, in the months before she died in November 2017. Her inquest will look at how algorithms used by social media firms to keep people hooked may have contributed to her death.
Elizabeth Lagone, the head of health and wellbeing policy at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is likely to be called to give evidence by video link from the US, the hearing was told.
Sanders said the family also wanted to review 29 internal Meta documents “setting out research into the impact of self-harm and suicide of material online on teenagers”.
He added: “There’s a considerable volume of material that we haven’t yet seen that we need to be able to review and process and follow up before the hearing can go ahead. And before Mr Russell can finalise his witness statement, because he wants to be able to reflect on the full disclosure and what he’s learned and give his evidence about that on behalf of the family.”
The review, held at Barnet coroner’s court in front of the senior coroner, Andrew Walker, heard that Meta had uncovered 12,576 pieces of Instagram content that Molly interacted with in the six months before her death in November 2017.
Sanders told the coroner: “This is unfamiliar territory, I’d imagine, for all of the advocates and for you, sir, too.”
Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, representing Meta, told the review that the content had yet to be redacted to protect the privacy of users, including many children. She said Meta would need another month to do this and to produce the content in the chronological order in which Molly viewed it.
Walker agreed to delay the start of the inquest until a provisional date of 19 September so that full social media data and the internal Meta research could be disclosed and reviewed.
Gallagher rejected the family’s criticism of the time involved. She said: “The family’s criticism is not accepted by Meta … It would be quite wrong to suggest that this data should have been provided before and that Meta failed to do so. It was only in December of 2021, three months ago, that Meta was made an interested person. And since that time Meta has engaged at great speed.
“There are multiple people engaged in ensuring we can provide content to you as quickly as possible and in as accessible away as possible. Of the 12,576 pieces of content, 1,580 pieces of those are content previously inaccessible, as they were behind private accounts.”
Gallagher said the company had to balance the privacy concerns of its users. She added: “The data provided to you is extremely extensive in volume and goes far beyond what would ordinarily provided even in the law enforcement context.” She pointed out that when printed out, the data was likely to run to 36,000 pages.
Gallagher suggested providing data covering a shorter period than the six months before Molly’s death. She said: “We have very much in mind concerns about proportionality and other matters and we wanted to raise with you the possibilities of providing you with a pdf for shorter periods.”
This request was rejected by Sanders, who noted that another social media company, Pinterest, had already supplied data from its site that Molly was known to have viewed.
He said: “We do want to see at least the six-month period in the order Molly interacted with it. The data that we have from Pinterest is covering the six-month period. It would make sense to see that material, notwithstanding the large volume.”
In a statement released after the review, Ian Russell said: “I have been seeking full details of Molly’s engagements and activity on Instagram for many years and despite Pinterest having been able to disclose full details of Molly’s activity on their platform years ago, Meta are only doing so now. For a global company worth billions to make a bereaved family wait even longer to get answers regarding the circumstances of their child’s death is utterly shameful.”
Merry Varney, partner at Leigh Day representing the Russell family, said Instagram “is a platform which still has a considerable amount of content depicting self-harm and suicide, owned by a company with vast resources”.
In the UK and Ireland, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or by email at pat@papyrus-uk.org, and Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 by email at jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-8255, or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
