Esther Ghey said technology companies ha d a “moral responsibility” to restrict access to harmful online content. She supports a total ban on social media access for under-16s – a move currently under debate in certain legislatures, including Florida in the US.
She believes her daughter was vulnerable after spending so much time online, lacking contact with her reallife friends. Ghey said she also thinks Brianna would be alive if her killers had not been able to access violent content on the dark web as well as on the regular internet as they plotted her murder on 11 February last year.
Talking to the Guardian, the 37-year-old food technologist said tech bosses were also culpable when it came to the wave of anxiety and mental health problems affecting children, which she said had led to “a complete lack of resilience in young people”.
She said tech companies should reflect not just on Brianna’s murder, but also “the amount of young people that have taken their own lives” as a result of their harmful experiences online.
She singled out X, formerly Twitter, for hosting pro-anorexia accounts that Brianna followed – resulting, perhaps, in her hospitalisation for an eating disorder in 2022. Ghey fears that a whole generation who have grown up watching porno graphy online will now struggle to form stable relationships .
This story is from the February 13, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the February 13, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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