Social Media and Suicide
News of an apparent serial killer shocked Japan when police searched the apartment of Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, uncovering dismembered parts of nine bodies, eight women and one man. Severed heads and limbs stored in tool boxes and cold-storage containers covered in cat litter apparently didn’t arouse the suspicion of Shiraishi’s neighbors for over two months. Police have charged him with abandoning bodies, some of whom were teenagers, but are expected to add murder and dismemberment to the list of crimes. Several news sources reported his occupation as a recruiter for a Tokyo red-light district escort service. Shiraishi confessed to sexually assaulting some of the women before their deaths.
"The psychological, and even physical, harms of social media are well-documented, but the larger issue is the reinforcement people receive when they post."
The most twisted part of the case is how Shiraishi selected his victims. He confessed to searching Twitter for suicidal women to lure them to his apartment, where he later killed them under the guise of a suicide pact, reportedly creating Twitter accounts for that specific purpose. His first victim complicated things by bringing her boyfriend, leading Shiraishi to kill him as well. Japanese media reported that he had complained to his father that his life had no meaning. Evidently, he gave it meaning by taking the lives of others, usually sharing his feelings of worthlessness. He was exposed when the brother of his first victim reported his sister missing a month ago. After reviewing her Twitter account, he traced a conversation about suicide to Shiraishi.
Paradoxically, Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world but the third-highest suicide rate in developed countries, preceded only by South Korea and Hungary. There have been rare acts of tremendous violence, like last year’s knife rampage at a center for the disabled that left 19 dead, or other killers who capitalized on online message boards that fostered widespread suicidal sentiment. As a result, the government has actively tried to create suicide prevention programs, even paying attention to online message boards like the ones used in the 2005 string of murders. Nonetheless, suicides persist, especially among younger demographics.
This will no doubt bring heavy scrutiny of social media services, as it should. People enter into an inherent, and often unacknowledged, danger when they expose deeply personal feelings on public platforms. An affirmation-seeking, positive or negative, public deludes itself by thinking the world is their therapist’s couch. The psychological, and even physical, harms of social media are well-documented, but the larger issue is the reinforcement people receive when they post.
Whether conscious or unconscious, every social media account is made with an image in mind, a curated assembly of someone’s life. When people exaggerate their feelings of despair, stress or anxiety to the point of suicidal thought, there is rarely a meaningful voice of reason. In fact, the more common response is a multitude of comments “admitting” the followers’ similar penchant for suicide. A forum that could be used for discussing these feelings, if it must be used to lay them bare at all, is thus turned into a perversion that breeds more of the stress-inducing, anxiety-creating, despair-encouraging culture.
Given this, it is not a large leap of the imagination to see how these exposed vulnerabilities can, and will, be used to deadly effect. Someone like Takahiro Shiraishi, themselves in a vulnerable and most likely mentally unstable position, has a digital world of opportunity at their fingertips. An opportunity to find like thinkers and future victims.
Another case earlier this year where Conrad Roy, an 18 year old, committed suicide with encouragement from his girlfriend brought up the role of texting and social media services in mental health debates. The girlfriend’s two and a half-year prison sentence also set an important precedent that one can be held responsible for incitement, if not physical murder. With more of these cases likely to continue in the future, the facilitators of social media have to weigh the inevitable harms of their technology with user autonomy and users must step back to evaluate the culture they participate in and promote.