The image is black and white, the girl is thin, her skin pale. She is curled up naked – head on knees, bird-like arms hugging her legs close, ribs laddering down her torso. A dark curtain of hair hides any distinguishable features. She could be anyone. She could be you.

Across the image is a scrawl of writing: ‘Worthless.’

My breath caught when I saw that social media post flash up on the screen in a montage of harmful posts while watching a new Channel 4 documentary. It’s called Molly vs The Machines and tells the story of 14-year-old Molly Russell who died from an act of self-harm in 2017 after being exposed to extensive suicide-encouraging content online.

I gasped at the picture, not because I was shocked by it, but because it was eerily familiar. I had seen it – or one much like it – many years before.

I am now 25, two years older than Molly would have been, and I remember my own teenage social media use as being relatively innocuous. I’d message my friends on Snapchat and put up the odd Instagram post from summer holidays (all now long taken down) but overall I regarded it as a place for making silly music videos and sending selfies with a dog filter on your face.

But that image brought back memories of Pinterest boards and photo blogs on Tumblr and a world I had seen occasionally on my ‘for you’ page on Instagram but had never fully been sucked into.

And I realised how lucky I was. For the truth is, a wobble in any teen’s fragile mental health back then, and especially a girl’s, could spiral into a dark place fast, nurtured by the digital wet nurse of social media algorithms.

If Molly Russell was vulnerable, that is because being a teenage girl on the internet in the 2010s was an inherently vulnerable place to be.

Our parents and teachers had no idea. Back then, for teen girls, the online aesthetic was all about the so-called ‘sad girl’. That ‘worthless girl’ post was just one example of the kind of stylised imagery it was constructed around. At root the ‘sad girl’ trope was a romanticisation of mental health issues, but it filtered into every part of our lives, and inevitably it became darker and darker.

Among all the warnings we were given by our teachers about cyber-bullying, trolling, and catfishing, the true threat we were never warned about was much harder to see.

Indeed to us it didn’t feel like a threat at all, but instead a self-affirming community, enabled and encouraged by an endless scroll of doom-laden quotes and aspirationally depressing images.

So why, and how, did the ostensibly comforting ‘sad girl’ community become so harmful?

In March 2016, Instagram announced that it would be moving from a chronological scroll timeline, which did not cherry pick or filter your social media feeds, to an algorithmic one, which did. And what that meant, as we all know to our cost by now, is that what you liked, you got more of, and what you didn’t, was hidden from you.

In a prescient article headlined Leave Me Out Of Your Instagram Algorithm Bubble published in Forbes in March 2016, senior tech contributor Tony Bradley wrote of the ‘problem’ this would create.

‘When our social media accounts are filled with sunshine and rainbows, we begin to think the whole world is sunshine and rainbows. When our social media accounts are filled with clouds and gloom, we begin to think the whole world is clouds and gloom.’

In creating a data-driven algorithm which feeds back to you more and more of what you engage with, you also create a hellish echo chamber which amplifies every negative thought.

And so, a ‘pro-ana’ blog (in other words a post on a social media site glamorising anorexia) could find itself on a 14-year-old’s Instagram feed at 2am, while she lay in bed scrolling.

It might be followed by a black-and-white picture of a beautiful girl with tears streaking her face, revelling in her melancholy, painfully thin, overlaid with the infamous 1990s Kate Moss quote ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.

Pictures and quotes like that came up on my feed. They were common enough that I recognised them and I recognised the way they made me feel. The sinking feeling that you didn’t look quite right, weren’t clever enough, pretty or kind or funny enough. It undercut what precious little confidence I had. By chance, it seems, I scrolled on without clicking on the posts.

The difference between Molly Russell and me – between Molly and any teenager on the internet at that time – could have been as simple as the choice to click on that picture and ‘like’ it.

And then, of course, Instagram would mark you down as a #sadgirl who wanted to be #skinny.

In the six months before her death, Molly was fed thousands of posts about self-harm and weight shaming, thousands of posts suggesting the world would be better without her in it. Her friends and parents had no idea. 

At a time in life when it is only natural to want independence, a secret online world that tells you what you want to hear seems to be the perfect escape and comfort. The problem is that once you start to engage, there is no way to escape.

The like-for-like nature of social media means that varied content is phased out in favour of high engagement. The posts say that ‘there is no way out’, not ‘this too shall pass’.

For mine and Molly’s generation the internet has had no checks and balances. We were used as guinea pigs in a great social experiment and offered no help once we were in the hellscape teenage insecurity amplifies.

Molly’s death was not just a tragedy. Her response to the ever-spooling darkness online is evidence of the fact that unregulated social media sites can kill. 

And the reluctance of the big tech owners to change their business models, to protect children, demonstrates they do not care enough to keep those users alive. We should all be fully aware of this.

In Molly vs The Machines, one of Molly’s friend’s says she has survivor’s guilt. ‘Why not me? Why her?’ she asks.

The fact is that it so easily could have been her. Over the course of my time at school and university, four fellow students took their lives.

We were 12 when we found out that a friend I had known since I was five was self-harming. By 15, conversations about body weight and how to look more like edgy model Cara Delevingne had started to echo pro-ana forums erupting on the internet – we compared and competed, encouraging ever-worse habits and thoughts about ourselves.

For me, that developed into six years of disordered eating and three years of therapy. But I felt as if I’d got off lightly. As a teenager, I knew so many peers who were referred to the NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

Even today, I seem to know more girls, now 20-something women, who have suffered an eating disorder and/or self-harmed than I don’t. We are not just the social media generation, we are a generation that ‘survived’ social media. But not unscarred.

What scares me is that things do not seem to be getting better. Even though on January 21 this year, the House of Lords backed a move to ban under-16s in the UK from social media platforms, it feels like an ineffective solution, given how easily teens in Australia have circumvented a ban – and clearly far too late.

Teenage mental health is in crisis. According to the charity YoungMinds, suicide was the leading cause of death for people aged five to 35 in England in 2022.

In August 2025, the Molly Rose Foundation – the activist charity founded by Molly Russell’s father Ian – found that social media algorithms are still ‘putting young lives at risk’ by recommending depression, suicide and self-harm content to accounts it set up pretending to be a 15-year-old girl.

Despite promises that things are changing, and community guidelines are coming in, they are AI-regulated and far too easy to evade.

Typing #skinnytok into TikTok today leads the searcher to a page which does not show posts but instead reassures them. 

‘If you or someone you know has questions about body image, food or exercise – it is important to know that help is out there and you are not alone. If you feel comfortable, you can confide in someone you trust or check out the resources below. Please remember to take care of yourselves and each other.’

But #snikytok brings up plenty of weight-loss and skinnytok content – they’re just hiding under an anagram of the original tag. One word #skinny does the same. There are still hundreds of posts under #sadgirl taking compilations from film and TV of women weeping, looking ‘pretty as they cry’.

The monster is still out there, but now it wears a different face. In 2017, governments and companies alike could plead ignorance as an excuse for the damage the internet was wreaking, even though, if you knew a teenager back then, that damage was happening in plain sight.

A decade on, that’s not enough. It took me two searches to find content today I know could destroy the mental health of a teenage girl.

You have to conclude the only thing big tech cares about is money. In which case, unplug them all.

Molly vs The Machines will be in cinemas nationwide on Sunday, March 1 and airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on Thursday, March 5.