In 2017, teenager Molly Russell took her own life. She was only 14 at the time, with her whole future ahead of her.
The culprit? Social media. After her death, her devastated family went through Molly’s accounts and found she had been viewing hundreds of posts linked to eating disorders, self-harm and suicidal ideation.
Almost ten years later, Molly’s story has taken on a new significance: as a lesson in the dangers of the digital age. Her father, Ian, has since become a campaigner for online safety, and it’s Ian who forms the heart of this new documentary about Molly’s life and legacy.
To say it makes for harrowing viewing is an understatement. Over the course of the hour-and-a-bit runtime, we meet Molly’s family as well as her friends, all of whom have – poignantly – grown up without her.
The entire thing is framed as a losing battle – one that Molly, indeed, ultimately lost. We hear about her death from Ian and from her friends, all of whom still choke up when talking about their friend. “She was fit as f***!” one of them says, describing her shock at Molly’s self-hatred.
At the same time, Molly vs The Machines also seeks to understand how this modern battleground came to be. The whole documentary starts with an AI prompt to ‘imagine Molly’s story from the view of the machines’ – it’s gimmicky, but illustrates just how powerful modern technology is, let alone the algorithms that were in use ten years ago.
As the documentary tells it, an early ‘move fast and break things’ mentality from Silicon Valley created modern social media as we know it, while the 9/11 attacks transformed it from an online playground into a surveillance tool.
By the time Molly was a teenager, modern algorithms had become so intelligent that the content she was able to access – and that she was fed, seemingly without any guidelines or restrictions – became a never-ending stream of dangerous content.
As Ian Russell puts it, even if a child is at home in their bed, if they have a smartphone with them, “there's a window which allows them to connect to the outside world. Decisions about what was suitable and not suitable for a 13,14 year old to see were being made remotely in Silicon Valley, almost experimentally.”
Silicon Valley doesn’t just mean Meta, of course, but as things progress, it’s Meta’s response to Molly’s death that we increasingly come to focus on. There’s a lot of buck-passing going on here, and the documentary lays it out in excruciating detail: from Nick Clegg squirming under questioning to Elizabeth Lagone, head of health and wellbeing policy at Meta.
We hear a lot from Lagone, actually, because the inquest is played out for us by actors, the better to understand the extent to which Meta refused to take responsibility for her death.
"This strikes me as a post that could help people feel less alone,” she replies smoothly when shown a post glorifying depression; she later claims other posts Molly saw were “safe.”
Ten years later, if anything has changed, it’s thanks to the courageous campaigning of Molly’s loved ones. And it’s they who give the documentary its heart and soul, as well as drive home the impact of their loss.
“I feel almost like a survivor,” one friend says. “It could have been any of us.” A decade later, it feels like those lessons are yet to be learned.
In cinemas from March 1, and on Channel 4 from March 4
