Published by The i Paper (22nd December, 2025)
Two years ago, on the night before Hogmanay, a 16-year-old Scottish boy who loved music and football chatted to his family about a holiday he was planning in Spain, then went to his bedroom and took his own life. Now the devastated parents of Murray Dowey are suing Meta after it emerged their son was being blackmailed on Instagram by scammers who – posing as a teenage girl – manipulated him into sending them intimate images. Their landmark case has been filed in the United States in tandem with the family of a 13-year-old Pennsylvania boy who also killed himself after falling victim to scumbag online predators.
There have been scores of such sad deaths around the world as this heinous crime surges, targeting children as young as 11. There are even scam factories in Asia and West Africa to exploit vulnerable victims. This case is the latest attempt to hold the social media firm accountable for lethal activities on its platform. Meta says it seeks to thwart sextortion, of course. But the families’ lawyer insists these deaths are the foreseeable consequence of deliberate design decisions. “Their own documents show that they were very aware of this extortion phenomenon, and they simply chose to put their profits over the safety of young people,” he said.
I wish the bereaved parents the best of luck. But what a tragic indictment of state failure that two grieving families must seek legal redress in their effort to rein in technology giants, stop horrible crimes and spare more despairing children from suicide.
Details of this case emerged days after a strong speech by new MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli, warning that control over the technologies remaking our world with incredible speed was shifting from governments to corporations and even individuals. “The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it,” she said.
Metreweli was right to argue that rapid advances in technology deliver big promise – connecting people, creating amazing products, curing diseases – but also immense peril. Yet after all that naive talk in the dawn of this digital age about how it would be such a boon for democracy and societal well-being, darker realities have become apparent. We see with growing clarity on too many fronts the dangers and harms being caused – especially when social media is unshackled and run by zealots such as Elon Musk, the far-right supporting owner of X, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. This company, bear in mind, had a precursor that ranked female students on campus, then revelled in its motto of “Move Fast and Break Things.”
The gods of Silicon Valley programme people’s behaviour to enrich themselves. Their opaque architecture determines what we see and do not see. Their firms have a business model designed to maximise engagement, leaving users hooked to screens, distracted from real human connections, seeking hollow validation and often outraged. Their platforms fuel extremism and poison discourse by pushing arguments to the edge, rewarding the loudest voices, demolishing trust in institutions and are easily weaponised by the enemies of freedom. Conspiracies, falsehoods and scams spread fast. Meanwhile, attention spans are shrinking, reading is collapsing and cognitive abilities are declining.
So we live in this astonishing age of hyper-connectivity where we can date online, converse in foreign tongues and find our way around any city – yet it is also a time of rising anger, anxiety, division, insecurity and loneliness. We are still in the infancy of this era as generative artificial intelligence is unleashed, empowering tech titans still further and speeding up this disruptive revolution. Yet again, the Silicon Valley gurus offer an enticing vision of amazing productivity gains, while deep-fake images and voice cloning already get abused by scammers and used to torment children.
There are tentative signs of a fightback. Britain passed a pioneering online safety act – inspired by the case of a teenage girl who killed herself after viewing images of self-harm – that led Nigel Farage to absurdly compare our country to North Korea but has been largely ineffective. Australia is trying to bar children from social media, like many schools around the world, seeing it as damaging to mental health. Finland adopts an intriguing alternative approach by embedding critical thinking into education to equip pupils for life in the digital world by sifting through online slop. The European Union fined X €120m for breaching transparency rules. Despite claiming to fight for free speech, Musk’s company responded by banning it from advertising on his cesspit.
These are all small steps. Yet note the howls of outrage over Europe’s efforts to enforce anti-trust rules, crack down on tax-dodging or tackle online lies and hate. The issue of free speech is a quagmire – as I know, having had an article wrongly flagged as false by Facebook before it apologised – while the curse of racism has exploded back into public debate. Last week, the United States threatened to hit back at Europe’s “discriminatory and harassing” measures under its president who despises our continent and recruited the venal tech gods to his destructive Maga army. Yet the Democrats were little better – for three decades, they prostrated themselves before these false idols, like so many complacent and foolish politicians around the world.
Power without responsibility – once famously described as the prerogative of harlots – is now the privilege of these all-conquering tech giants thanks to governments left dazzled by the online overlords. Democracies must find a way to hold them accountable for their harms, to make them liable for the lies and hate spewed on their sites, and restrain their hideously corrosive impact. For as the first quarter of our century comes to a close with an extraordinarily turbulent year, it is clear this struggle to control the digital space that has become our interface with the world will define the future – of countries, of culture, of democracy, of freedom and even of humanity itself.