The Pinterest boss told BBC that the death of Molly Russell is a daily reminder of the urgent need to make social networks safer for young people.
The Kotoro application operates as a digital Popalo notification board to the newspaper headlines, when the 14-year-old from Harrow in the north-west of London committed suicide in 2017 after viewing the online self-confusion content on the sites, including PinTEREST.
Later, the coroner ruled the material that she was subjected to, contributed to the “more than minimum path” to her death.
Turning to the matter publicly for the first time, Bill is ready – who became Pinterest’s boss in 2022, said that he was thinking about her “every day” and studying the lessons of her death “directs our work”.
“Being a parent’s parent, I can’t imagine how Molly’s pain feels in the family,” he said to BBC.
Pinterest has previously recognized The platform was not safe During the death of Molly.
The hearing in 2022 was said that when she first used the platform, she was subjected to a wide variety of content, but in a few months before she committed suicide, the content was much more focused on depression, self -overion and suicide.
Mr. was ready to say BBC that the platform has since “achieved significant success” in terms of providing “suitable age, safe experience, especially for young users”.
He emphasized how it made accounts for the younger age of 16, and by default by default under the age of 18, which means that strangers cannot contact children directly, at least he admitted that Pinterest was still “in no case perfectly.”
Since the death of Molly, nationwide debates have occurred about the responsibility of companies involved in medical technologies, with calls for more rigid regulation of social networks.
The government sought to make children's digital lives more safe through Online security law (OSA). Critics say that this does not go far enough, but some technical firms complained about this imposes unfair restrictions On them.
Mr. was ready that politicians should ignore those who claimed that social networks cannot be safer.
“I think that what politicians face so often is a significant rejection of industry to say:“ Well, it is simply impossible to do all this, ”he said to BBC.
“I hope that our role in all this is to show it.”
Earlier this year The company donated The Molly Rose fund, which was created in the teenager’s memory and is working on a decrease in suicide indicators among up to 25 years.
Reacting to comments by Mr. Woe, its executive director Andy Burrose said that the charity organization welcomed “any significant commitment to technical firms” to study what happened to Molly and make the “safety and well -being of adolescents” a priority.
M -n is ready that companies of social networks can learn from the automotive industry that has learned to compete for safety.
“Not so long ago, large automakers said that the seat belts were against their business model,” he said.
“Now families want cars that most exceed the ratings of crash tests. Why don't parents want the same from the applications that their children use? “
He said that now this is not the case when the technological industry is divided between companies “throwing caution in the wind” and those who are trying to build responsibly.
“Social networks have become too toxic – the industry needs responsibility,” he said.
However, the industry expert Matt Navarra noted that, as one of the small players in the market, there were restrictions on the influence that Pinterest could have.
“Pinterest can show an example and leading security issues in the industry, if she wants to try – but Tiktok and Instagram establish the rules,” he said to BBC News.
“Until the giants are copied and the main platforms followed, not many changes.
Thus, Pinterest can talk about the safety of everything he likes, but if others do not follow the example, parents will not be very different where it is really important. ”
