Investigation: a site providing directions on how to die is linked to at least ~45 suicides, as Google and Bing refuse to remove it absent a legal requirement
It has the trappings of popular social media, a young audience and explicit content on suicide that other sites don't allow.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times investigation lands on a platform industry that has long treated harmful-content moderation as discretionary: back in 2019, suicide tips were found spliced into kids' cartoon videos on YouTube, and experts flagged Facebook's opaque police-referral system for possible suicide threats as potentially unsafe. The through-line is that platforms act on harm only when pressured or regulated.
Families of the at least ~45 people linked to the site have no removal lever: Google and Bing keep surfacing it because no statute obliges them to delist it.
The named players' exposure shifts from reputational to legal — the 'absent a legal requirement' position only holds until a legislature writes one.
Second-order effects
Regulators answered precisely that invitation: Ofcom's 2024 finding that [[a:848879|22% of search results around basic self-injury terms produced single-click links to more harmful content]] gave the UK regulator the evidence base, and its Online Safety Act probe of a pro-suicide forum became the enforcement template for search-linked harm.
Search rivals face a compliance asymmetry — once one jurisdiction mandates delisting of pro-suicide content, Google and Bing must either build global removal workflows or operate country-specific indexes.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, harmful-content decisions migrate from platform policy teams to statutory duty-of-care regimes, turning 'we remove what's illegal' from a deflection into a defined legal obligation with penalties attached.
The longer arc runs from ad-hoc scandals (YouTube Kids, Facebook referrals) to systematic audits of search results themselves — meaning search quality becomes a measurable regulatory object, not just a product metric.
The trend: Platform moderation of life-threatening content is shifting from voluntary policy discretion to statutory duty-of-care enforcement, with Ofcom's Online Safety Act investigations setting the precedent other regulators are likely to follow.
This is the most gut-wrenching story I've ever worked on. So many deaths. So little accountability. And a long quest to find the two shadowy figures behind the website. w/@gabrieldance https://www.nytimes.com/...
CW: SUICIDE I implore you all read a very well written article by the successful and prominent journalist Megan Twohey about a forum website that encourages vulnerable people to commit suicide run by two vile INCELs. https://www.nytimes.com/...
This is a devastating account by @mega2e and @gabrieldance: Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/...
Front-page, national exposure about the fight to shut down a website that encourages people to take their own lives. The Trouble Shooters profiled the fight earlier this year: https://news4sanantonio.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Tragic story about a suicide forum linked to the recent Epik data breach that revealed the identities of many right-wing extremists. https://www.nytimes.com/...
cw: suicide I work on suicide as intellectual historical topic. I thought this article was about a particularly notorious “how to” site; it turned out to be about an entirely different, newer one. I have lost at least one person to a site like this. Read, but read w caution. http…
Most suicide websites focus on prevention. But the one started by two men who go by “Marquis” and “Serge” provides explicit directions on how to die. Our investigation linked the site to dozens of deaths and found that the toll is likely much higher. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The #EpikFail hack helped the @nytimes identify the two men running this suicide website: https://www.nytimes.com/.... (Background on the hack: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ....) https://twitter.com/...
Of course the suicide site owners cut their teeth on promoting violent misogyny: “when Reddit had banned an online group of incels for encouraging violence, Serge started an independent site for them, soon joined by Marquis” https://twitter.com/...
.@eSafetyOffice is proud to have played a small part in this terrifying & deeply distressing story. Our 2019 investigation turned up dark insights which @gabrieldance & @mega2e took much further. We'll continue to fight to protect 🇦🇺s but Big Tech needs 2 step up responsibility! …
And the reach of this suicide-pushing website is HUGE: “The site now draws six million page views a month, on average — quadruple that of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, according to data from Similarweb, a web analytics company.” https://twitter.com/...
We think of the suicide crisis as a collective failure, no one fault's and everyone's. But @mega2e and @gabrieldance have unmasked two extremist figures helping to push vulnerable young people over the edge. Even more terrifying: no one is stopping them. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
CW: Suicide This is an important article highlighting search engines' role in directing people to pro-suicide websites. Co-authors & I recently published an article auditing search engine performance on suicide queries in @journalsafetech https://tsjournal.org/... Key findings: h…