Molly vs THE MACHINES is a new documentary about the British teenager Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 at the age of 14. The film looks at the role social media – in particular Instagram – played in her death and follows her father Ian’s fight for justice. This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place onstage last month after a screening at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in London between Ian Russell, two of Molly’s schoolfriends, Charlotte Campbell and Sophie Conlan, and the film’s director, Marc Silver. It was moderated by Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr.
The documentary, accompanied by a film of this conversation, will be shown at cinemas nationwide this Sunday 1 March. Full details here. It will then be broadcast on C4 on Thursday 5 March, 9pm.
CAROLE
I'd like to say on behalf of the whole audience that we are incredibly moved and touched that you've taken part in this film. It's an incredibly courageous thing to open yourself up in this way. Can you talk about the process behind agreeing to do this, what it's been like, and what you're hoping people will take away from it?
IAN
It's easier for those of us who knew Molly, because, as her friends here show, she was just the most amazing person. I'm sure she would have grown up to do amazing things. So there's a sense of trying to fill the gap that's left behind her, and that sense was immediate.
We wanted something good to come out of the tragedy. We wanted other people to know more about the problems that could be found online, in the hope that others could be safer. We set up the Molly Rose Foundation [the charity family and friends established within a year of her death] in order to raise awareness about the dangers of online harms and lend support to people under the age of 25 specifically. This project grew out of that.
The extraordinary process of the inquest, which took nearly five years, was also completely crucial to us – it was the right and proper method by which we could learn lessons from Molly's tragedy. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary coroner in Andrew Walker, because I gather that not all coroners would have been so determined to obtain the evidence that he insisted the tech companies provide.
Before the inquest was completed, we met Marc, [which presented] the opportunity to continue that story, to use Molly's story to do good and to expose the hideous business models of these unfeeling, uncaring, inhuman tech platforms. We set down that road in order to do some good and to spread the word.
CAROLE
I really believe this film will continue that work. Sophie and Charlotte, that must have been quite something – seeing that story up on the big screen. Was that the Molly you knew?
SOPHIE
I think it captures Molly in the best light possible. She was one of the purest souls I have ever met. I've never come across anybody with just that purity. Everything about her was so innocent – her likes, her dislikes. It makes you angry seeing what happened, but it's not the sort of angry where you want to scream and shout. It's an anger that says: this is a joke. And in the two years since filming, it has got even worse. The accessibility young people have to things like ChatGPT and everything else now – it's even worse. It's literally now or never.
CHARLOTTE
Like Sophie said, Molly was just incredible. There is no one like her. She was the funniest, sassiest, jokiest person I've ever met.
But it's hard. It's really infuriating to see what happened, because of how preventable it was. That didn't have to happen to Molly. The fact that she took her own life because of what she saw – and obviously other factors – it's just so preventable. It makes you so angry watching this. I didn't know the side of Molly that social media saw. I saw the happiest girl ever, who loved musicals and loved her cats. It's so, so different. And you just can't help but feel so angry towards these tech companies.
‘How did the machine even know what Molly was feeling, and how did it know how to exploit that?’
CAROLE
I think it's a really useful emotion to have.
I met Marc back in 2018 when he made a short film about Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie. We kept in touch after that, and Marc told me he'd started reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and that he wanted to make a film about it. And from that came this amazingly human, brilliant story. Can you talk about the process of how you got there?
MARC
It was through you, which led to Chris Wylie's whistleblowing. Through what I learned from Chris, and from Shoshana, I first came across a small article about Molly – maybe a year and a half before the inquest – and I encountered that article through the lens of those two.
As much as Molly's story is about harmful content, what I saw was that underneath the surface of the harmful content was something bigger: how did the machine even know what Molly was feeling, and how did it know how to exploit that? I was able to take this 30-year history of Silicon Valley and lay it against Molly's timeline – different points in her life which matched up to the evolution of what was happening with social media – and we worked out how to thread all that together.
‘If a young person finds harmful content online, they’re not doing anything bad. It's that content that has found them’
CAROLE
Ian, one of the things the audience may not know is how important the inquest was – that in this suburban court in London, a global, multibillion-dollar company was actually finally held to account, and you got this incredible verdict in which Instagram was essentially found partly responsible for Molly's death.
You talk about this before-and-after so movingly. Your "after" is that you became this campaigner – first for justice for Molly, and then for everything else. How have you kept going? Because it's incredibly difficult when you're up against these companies.
IAN
Of course they're hugely powerful – they have more money and power than many nations. They are hidden in plain sight. We used to draw lines on maps and look at geopolitical power around the world, but these entities are more powerful than many nations and yet invisible on those maps.
I don't see them like that, though, because they're led by people. Mark Zuckerberg is a person. Elon Musk is a person. Peter Thiel is a person – apparently; it's debatable.
So I just see it in human terms. And what powers me is that we've reached a point where everyone in public life, certainly every parent I speak to, is saying: this is wrong. This isn't good enough. We have to do something about it.
The extraordinary journey we've been on as a family has been propelled by people who want to be part of it: parents who want a safer digital world, the extraordinary legal team who fought to get the data out of the platforms – particularly Meta, who didn't want to supply it. The research from Molly's charity shows that Molly may have died eight years ago, but the sort of content she saw then – which the platforms claim they've addressed – is still available. It is still being algorithmically recommended. There may be a slightly blurred screen you have to click through, but ostensibly nothing has changed. Instagram claimed they introduced 30 tools to protect children, then 50 tools. When we went to investigate, we couldn't even find them all, and most seemed to have disappeared or weren't working.
That's what powers me. It's just like Molly would have said: it's wrong. Stop it.
I think it's really important to emphasise that if a young person finds harmful content online, they're not doing anything bad. It's that content that has found them. Because if you think you've done something bad, you're going to hide and not tell anyone about it – and then the problem can multiply.
CAROLE
Marc, can you talk about the approach to the film – using the point of view of the machine, using AI to narrate?
MARC
Ian is the protagonist in film terms, but the edit wasn't working because we didn't have an antagonist. We didn't have this battle.
Then, very coincidentally, I left the edit one Friday evening and got a message from a friend on Instagram: “Have you seen this?” I was on the tube watching a video of a mum at a kitchen sink asking ChatGPT: "From the perspective of the devil, if you wanted to control children, how would you do it?" And ChatGPT answered by literally describing every beat of what social media is. I thought it was a spoof, so I had to research whether it was real. It turned out it was. I went home that night and typed in: "From the perspective of the devil, tell me the story of Molly Russell." And it, horrifically, told that story.
I spent that weekend continuing that conversation with the machine and had a 100-page document by the end of it. None of us had really used AI up to that point, and as an artist I'd conditioned myself to avoid it because of questions of theft and IP. But I started thinking: maybe there's a way of subverting this technology.
CAROLE
Marc, this is such a human story, and it's so important. But there's something else going on right now: these companies, these men, are lining up behind Trump, and these surveillance technologies are intimately implicated in his increasingly authoritarian regime.
MARC
I think about this literally all the time. I always felt there was a clue in this story that connects to that. It goes back to the moment I first read about Molly and that question: how does the machine even know this? The power these companies have attained – financially, but more than that politically, through constant surveillance and what they can do with that knowledge – is one of the reasons we've reached the point you're describing.
CAROLE
Charlotte and Sophie, this idea of what the machine knows about you, what the algorithms know about you. When you're being fed content on social media now, do you notice it? Do you find yourself wondering: why are they sending me that?
CHARLOTTE
I don't really use Instagram much any more. The one app I'm unfortunately quite addicted to is TikTok, and I definitely notice it constantly feeding me things – even content I've never paid attention to. For example, I like to cook healthy food and generally live healthily. And yet I'll get fed posts where young people are promoting anorexia. I just don't understand how it makes that link, and I don't want to see it. I feel really sympathetic towards the younger generation – why should they have to try to beat an algorithm?
‘We are far more addicted to this than we know. We've been through it firsthand, and we're still on social media’
CAROLE
What do you each hope this film will achieve? What do you want people to take away? What should people do?
SOPHIE
Personally, I want people our age to start realising that we are far more addicted to this than we know. We've been through it firsthand, and we're still on social media. If that doesn't show that this isn't simply a matter of choosing to come off it, I don't know what will. We do need to take the right steps – as users, and as far as we can with the companies.
But beyond that, I just want people to see Molly and her story, because she should be here. We shouldn't have had to lose our friend. Ian shouldn't have had to lose his daughter. It's just not worth it. Is Instagram really worth it to us? We all know it's not.
CHARLOTTE
I hope everyone, especially the people running these social media companies, remembers the name Molly Russell and understands what they did. I hope the film educates people, and, like we're doing here tonight, sparks discussions – particularly among young people, because that's the generation being affected. And I just want everyone to see who Molly was. She was so much more than a story about viewing harmful content. She was an incredible human being. And like Sophie said, she should still be here.
MARC
I've been thinking a lot about the phones in all of our hands, and what happens as we scroll. We don't know what's going on behind that scroll. Sometimes when I watch the film I think: this is valuable because it reveals the thing behind the screen that we never get to see – and therefore can never talk about as a family, as a community, or as a school. I hope it undoes some of that.
IAN
In the offline world, we have found ways to regulate, police and learn from new technology. We don't seem to have applied any of those lessons online. If we took what has worked offline and employed it online, we would have the safe digital world we all deserve. And all these problems would disappear, because the companies producing them would no longer be incentivised to promote them.
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