San Francisco (AFP)
Instagram, the network dedicated to photos and videos of the Facebook group, on Monday extended the list of prohibited images likely to encourage suicide or self-injury, adding drawings and other fictional content.
Very popular among young people, Instagram had already banned, in early February, photos showing injuries inflicted on oneself, to help fight against this plague.
"We will no longer allow fictitious representations of self-mutilation or suicide on Instagram, such as drawings or the content of movies or comics," Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in a blog post.
"We will also remove images that do not (directly) show self-mutilation or suicide but are related to the materials or methods associated with it," he added.
The decision to ban such images was taken while the father of a young Briton, Molly Russell, who committed suicide in 2017 at the age of 14, accused Instagram of having a responsibility in this tragedy. The teenager had, according to her father, consulted a lot of content related to suicide or self-harm.
The boss of Instagram was then "upset" by the death of the teenager. "It's the kind of thing that strikes you in the heart and does not leave you," he said in an interview with the British daily The Daily Telegraph.
"The tragic reality is that some young people are negatively influenced by what they see online and therefore risk getting hurt," Mosseri said in his blog post on Monday. "It's a real risk," he said.
Instagram said that within three months of the policy change, the service had "reduced the visibility of, or added sensitivity screens" to more than 834,000 content items.
© 2019 AFP