Social Media: A Cause of Suicide in Children

AN EXAMPLE OF SOME OF THE ABUSE THAT SOME OF THE ABUSERS REQUEST. PHOTO PROVIDED.

Social media is changing every day and is beginning to be impossible to keep up with. But younger children are starting to be able to navigate social media platforms more easily and these platforms are also becoming more accessible for them. As a result of this, children are becoming more susceptible to the side effects of social media, with one of those side effects sadly being suicide.

Jaafar Omer Ahmed published an article in 2023 on “[s]ocial media psychology and mental health” that found the number of people using social media had increased from 361 million people in 2000 to roughly 3.6 billion people in 2016.

Ahmed found that the most popular social media platform, in ways of use, was Facebook in 2016 with “1.71 billion monthly active users.” Then in 2018 he conducted another survey that found 68% of US adults had a Facebook account, with 75% of them using it daily. Ahmed also found that 78% of young adults were actively using Snapchat and 71% using Instagram as well.

Social media is another form of technology and with all technology there are good things and there are bad things. A good thing that comes out of having social media is communication and connections you can make with people who are not in your immediate area. But, with that, comes the people that hide behind their phone or computer screen when talking with other people.

People use social media to socialize and get to know other people, creating social connections and relationship that are “necessary for [your] well-being.” This allows people to be able to affiliate themselves with others as well as organizations. This can be a very good thing, as you can become affiliated with many different online organizations that give to different causes, but at the same time this can get you in trouble if you are affiliating yourself with the wrong people.

Many people use social media to fill needs that they have in life as well and their needs are based off the 5 needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. These needs are, physiological needs, safety requirements, love or belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Social media platforms allow you to connect with a lot of people and this is where this hierarchy of needs comes into play. You can communicate and create strong relationships with people and these relationships can help boost your self-esteem, it can help to fulfill psychological needs by talking about different things to others that understand your situation, and you can create loving relationships over social media as well. But these trusted relationships can get out of hand, and you can be creating problems for yourself in the long run. 

In 2019 a 16-year-old student at Coffee County Central High School in Tennessee was just trying to meet one of Maslow's needs, love or belonging, when things took a turn. Channing Smith was talking online with another male classmate and was sharing some “explicit” messages with him. After exchanging these messages, Channing’s classmate shared them on social media outing Channing as bisexual.

Only a few hours after his classmate shared their exchange Channing took his own life my shooting himself. After the incident, Channing’s older brother said, “There was no way he could have gone to school afterward”. Just before he shot himself, Channing posted one last time on Instagram saying, “I really hate how I can’t trust anyone because those I did were so fake”. This case just goes to show how people can portray themselves differently online versus in person.

A person portraying themselves differently online can be tied into associating yourself with the wrong types of people. Some people can seem like really great people online until they do not. There are many people out there that pose as others to get your attention or to gain someone’s trust, and this could lead to potentially very harmful situations.

It can be very hard to tell if a person is who they are telling you they are while using social media, and this can cause you to trust the wrong person. The people posing as someone they are not can gain your trust and get you to do things that you typically would have no part in.

Mack Lamoureux wrote an article on February of 2024 for Vice titled the “The Vile Sextortion and Torture Ring Where Kids Target Kids”. In the article she discusses the online social networks known as 764. This took place over many different social media sites but primarily on Discord, an app that people use to chat with others.

This network would use a hierarchy system where the higher you are on the totem pole the more evil you were, and the goal was to become the most evil person. The higherups in this network gain your trust and start grooming you in order for you to do what they want. Then once they have your trust, they will get you to do whatever they tell you with sextortion, when this person convinces you to send them sexually explicit images of yourself, and then using them against you.

764 would use the images they got from people to blackmail them into creating what can now be known as “cut sign”, when the victim carves the name of their abuser into their own body. People were also being blackmailed into abusing other people and killing pets, and all these acts would be committed on a live stream for people to watch.

The FBI had gotten involved with the case of 764 and while not giving a direct report on their findings they did point Mack in the right direction to find one of their briefings. After looking into the briefing, she found that the FBI said, “from October 2021 to March 2023 it received over 13,000 reports of sextortion of minors, which lead to ‘”at least 20 suicides’”.

No person should ever feel like suicide is their only way out of any situation they are in. Social media can be very beneficial in making connections with people online and can be a safe space for you to talk to people, if used in the correct manner, but it can also lead to serious problems if not being used appropriately. While this is only a brief overview and only touches on 21 occasions where cyberbullying resulted in children killing themself, it is happing all over the world every day. That is why cyberbullying is such a prevalent issue and why there needs to be a change.