Instructions:
All students do the paraphrase and summary activity. You have 1hr 50 minutes to
complete this task. Additionally, 12 cfu students have 2 hours more to write a
formal essay.
Revealed: how Big Tech pushes teens like Molly Russell to suicide
Sian Griffiths,
January 27 2019 The Sunday Times
1) A number
of families have accused technology
giants of aiding their children’s
suicides in the wake of the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, in November 2017. Molly took her
own life after viewing images of self-harm on the Internet including, a picture of a teenage girl hanging
and many “mottos” that normalised suicide. 2)The health minister, Matt
Hancock reacted by telling social media sites to take responsibility for their
effect on young lives.
In an interview
with The Sunday Times, Molly’s father, Ian,
criticised the online scrapbook site Pinterest, as well as Instagram, for
hosting disturbing content that he believes played a part in his daughter’s
death. Ian commented 3),“The more I
looked into Molly’s online accounts, the more there was that horror that I was getting a glimpse into something
that had such profound effects on my lovely daughter,” he said.
“Pinterest has a huge amount to answer for.”
The site, a virtual scrapbook driven
by algorithms that is hugely popular with young women, even sent a personalised
email to Molly’s email address a month after she died, with self-harm images
including a slashed thigh. The email said: “I can’t tell you how many times I
wish I was dead.”
4) The
Sunday Times created a pseudonymous account for a child aged 14 to test how the
Pinterest algorithm can target users with
personalised content and tempt them to spend longer on the site. Pinterest
immediately started to suggest pictures
relating to suicide, including a fist holding white pills and images of blood
and cuts. This newspaper also made more than 20 complaints about images on
Instagram soon after the company had expressed sorrow to Molly’s family. 5) The complaints were all rejected and the company decreed the images
were fit to be viewed by children aged 13 and over. This was despite
Instagram claiming that “content that promotes self-harm or suicide violates
our community guidelines and is removed when we are made aware of it”. Many of
our selected images had hashtags such as “ihatemyselfandiwanttodie” and “killmeplease”.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, criticised the complacency of social
media companies over their impact on children’s health and happiness. He has
written to technology companies including Instagram’s owner — Facebook —
Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Apple and Google 6) telling
them to remove disturbing material or face legislation. He said he felt
“physically sick” reading about Molly’s death. 7) “I feel the fear of
a parent that our children can be torn away from us, aided by new technology,” he
added. “So I am determined to do what is necessary to stop teenagers falling
into a suicide trap. “We must act now, so technology is seen to improve lives,
and stop it causing harm. This is a critical moment — as a supporter of digital
technology, I don’t want the benefits of technology to be lost because of
reasonable concerns about its risks. But most importantly, I don’t want another
family to have to go through the agony of losing a child this way.”
In his letter he wrote: “I welcome that you have already taken important
steps, and developed some capabilities to remove harmful content. But I know
you will agree that more action is
urgently needed. “It is appalling how
easy it still is to access this content online and I am in no doubt about the harm this material can
cause, especially for young people. 8)“It
is time they step up and purge this content once and for all. “I want
to work with internet and social media providers to ensure the action is as effective
as possible. However, let me be clear that we will introduce new legislation
where needed.”
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PARAPHRASE
Re-state
clearly and concisely the ideas expressed in the 10 underlined phrases bring
sure to reference the subject of the sentence if a pronoun is used. You may
need to reformulate the whole sentence as well as change word class to do
this effectively. You do not need to find synonyms for names of people, their titles or for the
terms social media, internet accounts and self-harm.
SUMMARY
Using
your own words write a clear, concise summary of the main idea and key points
raised in this article remembering to attribute sources of information. You
are advised to write a first draft and then work on that to produce a good
copy. You should write between 150-170 words. You will be penalized if you
exceed this limit by more than 10%.
|
9) Ian Russell is now calling for the
establishment of an independent regulator to ensure that “distressing content
can be removed from social media and online within 24 hours.” He was
dismayed by the refusal of some tech companies to give him access to Molly’s
accounts so that he could see the content she was looking at in the hours
before her death and
has criticised Apple
for not helping him to access data on her phone that may explain what happened.
Russell has met other grieving
parents whose children killed themselves after viewing distressing content,
similar to that he believes Molly saw.
Six technology giants — including Apple, YouTube and Facebook — are
expected to be asked this week by the coroner, Andrew Walker, who is presiding
over Molly’s inquest, to hand over the information they hold about her
accounts. If the companies refuse, they could be ordered to hand over the data,
according to Russell’s lawyer, Merry Varney, of Leigh Day.
10) Instagram
said: “We work with expert groups who tell us that the sharing of a person’s mental
health journey can be an important part of recovery. This is why we don’t remove certain content and instead offer people looking at, or posting
it, support messaging that directs people to groups that can help.”
830 words
LETTORATO A.A. Magistrale 1 LM 37 2018 / 2019
Sessione estiva, giugno
2019
COGNOME
…………………………………… NOME ………………………………. MATR ……………....
INDIRIZZO: EAAS /SLLT …………… CFU..................
VOTO SCRITTO / ………………..
PART TWO: FORMAL ESSAY
You have TWO HOURS to complete your essay. You may use
a monolingual dictionary in this part of the exam. You will lose marks for short or incomplete
essays.
Write an
appropriately structured essay in 400 words with this title:
Are the internet and social media companies really
to blame for teenage suicides. What do you think?
Instructions
Make sure you
follow a clear line of argument from your introduction to conclusion. Your
essay should be properly punctuated, written in a formal register, with
adequate paragraphing and contain appropriate grammar and vocabulary. The following editorial and comments/quotes on the
topic may give you some ideas. Depending
on your point of view you should use a selection of them in your essay
paraphrasing and integrating them into your writing attributing the source
while keeping direct quotation to a minimum.
Online comments
Caleb Boone
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen: Of course this is a horrible tragedy. And all
other similar deaths of young people are awful tragedies which can easily be
prevented. First, I agree that such images and messages encouraging self-harm
and suicide should be completely banned on the internet, television and
elsewhere by law. Second, law enforcement should actively police the internet
to enforce such laws. But, third, and most important of all, parents must take responsibility
for their children’s Spiritual and mental health. Healthy children will protect
themselves from awful messages and pictures on the internet. They themselves
will avoid and not be swayed by such things if they have been properly raised
by loving, attentive parents. All the laws in the world will do nothing if
parents do not take full responsibility for everything their children read,
see, hear and do. Being a parent is a tremendous responsibility which is
exhausting, extremely taxing, and infinitely difficult and expensive. It is
all-consuming. But it must be borne with love, generosity, forgiveness, wisdom,
intelligence, grace, dignity and aplomb. Those who cannot fulfill it should
never dream of getting married and should never even think of having children.
That would save society trillions of dollars annually.
Ethel
Smythe
My sympathies for the family. I was utterly
shocked by this story. My grandchildren aren't that into social media so I have
no personal experience of such irresponsible sites and I don't understand why
it has ever been allowed. I want to know who is really behind such socially
destructive material and what is their agenda. It is definitely adults and they
should be in jail for at least 20 years.
F Wood
Here we go again with the "blame
game " the girls father gets interested in her social media sites after
the event , you ignore your youngsters at your own peril, they are growing up
and they are vulnerable , but its parental care that matters most they used to
say if you don't like what's on TV turn it off . I really can’t see what
corporate responsibility there needs to be when you can't or won't supervise
and question your own kids.
Reply
Rich Peters
If Pinterest and others won’t remove this type of poisonous content they
should be shut down. No loss whatever. F-k em.
Reply
John Austin; How do you suggest the UK government shut down a
company headquartered in California?
Chris Niebergal
:Everyone should expect that teenagers are secretive, it has been so since
the dawn of time.
Janie Purbeck
I am very non Politically Correct and frequently make comments on the
subject. It is unthinking to lay blame on the parents who might not have
been tech savvy enough to monitor their daughters social media accounts and, in
any case, they might be reading this. It's a much better use of comment space
to debate who set up such a site and what their motive could possibly be rather
than attacking the bereaved. Don't you think ?
As a teenager of two full time, working parents, it is rich some of the
comments saying "my child would never be allowed to use social media
unsupervised". Okay. Sure. You will of course be able to watch over your
teenagers phone/laptop every second, check their internet search history
because incognito browsing isn't a thing, and be met with no ill feelings at
all. Next, have you recently clicked on an article on any internet browsing
platform and been met with GDPR "Accept" or "Amend" before
you can see the content you want to view, and just clicked accept? You've
probably hit yes at least once instead of un-clicking every option that allows
them to obtain your information for advertising. Then, when you are on said
page you see that thing you were looking at on Amazon/John Lewis/Made/Etsy etc.
this is because they know what you like to look at based on your cookies. To
give this context, try it. Go, search something on amazon, research that new
couch or TV you want to buy, or a dress for that wedding you've got coming up.
Then, go on your preferred social media platform/news outlet/search
engine/anything and there will be an advert for it, or the consumer site you
used to look it up, or products strangely similar to the ones you looked up Similarly,
when you search things on any social media platform that algorithm of that page
comes to the consensus that this is of interest to you, so we will show you
more of this so you keep using our platform. A young person searches images out
of curiosity/their current feelings/being told or exposed to it by a friend and
that platform will remember. REGARDLESS of the content they are searching. This
means that the tech giants KNOW your child is searching images of self
harm/suicide/anorexia/bulimia/steroid use/violent sex etc. and do nothing to
block this content. They will be shown this increasingly more, and when they
click on it the site remembers this and thinks the person is interested in
this. I know this having been a teenager that used these sites, it's an
unhealthy cycle that can end in tragedy..
Joely
Northwood
I really despair of all the parents who
are so quick to criticise and have the answer to everything. I so wish that we
didn’t have all this social media but the genie isn’t going back in the bottle
so we need to learn to
deal with it.
