Dying by Design
A series of deaths linked to an online suicide forum exposed one of the darker corners of the internet – activists say it’s long past time to shine a light on the largely unregulated platforms putting young people’s mental health and, increasingly, lives at risk. Is anybody listening?
Summary
Online safety campaigner, activist and author Adele Zeynep Walton argues that unregulated online platforms are failing vulnerable users, particularly young people, by allowing harmful communities and dangerous information to flourish. Walton came to activism following the death of her own sister, who engaged with an online suicide forum before taking her life in 2022. Walton calls for stronger government regulation and greater accountability from technology companies whose platforms profit from engagement while neglecting user safety.
My sister Aimee and I are part of the ‘anxious generation.’ Born in 1999 and 2001, respectively, we were part of that generation of children who had a childhood without social media, but an adolescence entirely shaped by it. And even though we came to social media as teens, Aimee and I had bonded as children through digital devices – from PS1 to Nintendo Wii, to Xbox 360. Our generation’s digital habits have baffled grandparents and frustrated parents, with Gen Z often getting the blame for creating a world where people walk the streets heads down and hands glued to screens.
Born this way
But we never asked to be this way. Growing up in an ever-changing digital world championed by ‘tech bros’ who promised us a utopian vision of a future made friction-free by technology, my generation was using online spaces before we understood the consequences, both for society at large and our lives individually.
Undeniably, Aimee and I were both avid users of social media from its early inception. I often say that if Aimee and I were a Venn diagram, the internet would be our intersecting centre. While we shared the same interests – music, fashion and food – our tastes were different, and online was where they flourished. As teens, we spent hours scrolling on Tumblr, photographing each other in our favourite outfits on holiday for Instagram, messaging friends on Snapchat. Social media wasn’t the centre of our world, but it occupied a huge part of our adolescence, and our online profiles weren’t just digital footprints, they were an extension of ourselves.
Digital danger
But, following the pandemic, the online community that Aimee had drawn joy and inspiration from as a gifted young artist and musician was replaced by one lurking in the toxic and sinister underbelly of the internet. Struggling with her mental health and seeking connection, Aimee did what she had been doing ever since she got her first smartphone, and turned to the digital world, the same one that had offered her solace in previous periods of loneliness. But this time, what she found was not the reassurance and support needed, but an online space and community that encourages suicide and preys on vulnerable people.
In October 2022, two police officers knocked on the door of our family home; they were there to tell us that Aimee had died. Eventually, we learned from police sources that Aimee had been a frequent visitor to a website with over 40,000 users and 2 million posts that is dedicated to encouraging suicide. A place where suicide methods and instructions are just a quick Google search away and no effort is made to guide users to resources that could help them to survive. As I write in my book, “[This] isn’t a safe space, it’s a toxic breeding ground. It is a space where despair is fuelled, and suicide is ridiculed, and spoken about as casually as a decision to buy a new jacket or book a holiday”.
A growing crisis
Staggeringly, we now know this site is responsible for taking 133 UK lives, including Aimee’s. Most of the other victims are young people, too, which only points to the mounting mental health crisis our generation is facing, in part as a result of addictive social media that harms our wellbeing. As well as the two American men who founded this forum, sinister actors are using it to make a profit by selling deadly chemicals on the website to vulnerable people like Aimee. In January 2026, a man in the UK was jailed for selling poison to four people on the site.
Italy, Germany and Turkey have banned access to this site, but it remains accessible in the UK. This is even though, since 2019, coroners have warned government departments 65 times about this site and the poison it promotes. This is why, in 2025, we launched Families and Survivors to Prevent Online Suicide Harms, with the support of the online safety charity Molly Rose Foundation.
At the end of 2025, we wrote to Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling for a public inquiry to identify the scale of harm facilitated by suicide forums like this one. As of this writing, Ofcom have failed to take action against the site, beyond a mildly worded warning.
Imagine if the two American men who founded this forum hired billboards across the UK with instructions and resources that allow for the systematic assisting of suicide. I have no doubt that the authorities would act within hours. But in this case, because it’s playing out online, years have passed with no action.
Who can be safe online?
My sister’s story is not isolated, nor is it rare; it is simply one of the more shocking examples of digital technology failing us. As it stands, tech companies are cashing in on a crisis of our humanity, with young and vulnerable people being most at risk. This is what has brought us to the conversation on social media bans for under 16s, which Australia has enacted, and of which the House of Lords voted in favour in the UK earlier this year.
But what happens when a child turns 17 and they’re faced with a cliff edge of harm? What about neurodivergent teens like Aimee, many of whom find community and empowerment online? A ban risks putting the onus once again on the user, in this case young people, instead of holding the companies responsible for these platforms, and the content allowed to linger on them, to account.
The problem isn’t exclusively social media or smartphones themselves; it is the addictive design of social media platforms that prey on our vulnerabilities and profit from maximising our time spent online. If social media were designed with user wellbeing at its core, young people would not be battling with their mental health as a result of addictive platforms that polarise, consume and hook them in.
Social media does not have to be this way; I truly believe it could be a force for good, and as a member of Gen Z I’ve witnessed the possibility of those benefits in my own life. But real change will only happen if the addictive and exploitative business model of social media is reined in.
Technology is developing at a pace that the vast majority of us, and our lawmakers, are struggling to keep up with. Currently, it is activists and lived experience campaigners who are relentlessly firefighting against the sheer scale of online harms, while Big Tech companies add more fuel to the flames, sit back and line their pockets in the process. Governments speak of the economic benefits of new technologies, while seeming to forget the human costs and emotional tolls. Most recently, the AI hype is fuelling the same harms that we’ve witnessed with unregulated social media.
As my mum said in the days following my sister’s death, “If you bought a toaster and used it, but got electrocuted and died, that company would go under. Why are social media platforms any different?” Tech platforms have the duty of product safety, and not only are they failing miserably, but our governments are failing to hold these failures to account.
… it’s a toxic breeding ground. It is a space where despair is fuelled, and suicide is ridiculed, and spoken about as casually as a decision to buy a new jacket or book a holiday
Preventable tragedies
Every time I learn of a new life lost, I’m infuriated that another family has had to go through this preventable tragedy, one that could be ended in an instant with proper enforcement from regulator Ofcom and bold action from the UK government.
This is a national scandal, but one that, inexplicably, is not being broadly recognised as such. The mistakes are many: mental health systems have failed our loved ones (largely members of our youngest generations); families’ concerns have been dismissed; police have failed to investigate and approach mental health with care and sensitivity; the Home Office has refused to strengthen regulation of a poison whose use is discussed and instructed online; welfare checks are conducted purely as a tick-box exercise; and the National Crime Agency has left families, including my own, in the dark.
Losing Aimee left us with endless questions, and for the past three years I’ve been trying to get those in power held accountable. But, for as long as the government and Ofcom fail to take action against this website, expecting users and parents to police themselves and their children in an online battle they have no chance of winning, vulnerable people will continue to lose their lives.
For the sake of my generation and those yet to come, we need action. There is no more time to waste.
Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Call 116 123 for free or visit samaritans.org
Learn more about the Logging Off Club.
Adele Zeynep Walton is an online safety campaigner,
journalist and author of Logging Off: The Human
Cost of Our Digital World. She is also the co-founder
of the Logging Off Club, which aims to bring people
together away from social media and without phones
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