Lawmakers in Washington are pushing technology companies to take steps to limit the visibility and reduce the risks of a website that provides detailed instructions on suicide.
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Responding to a New York Times investigation into the website published this month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a bipartisan statement Monday requesting updates from search engines, web hosting companies and other technology companies whose services may have benefited from the suicide-instruction website.
“It is imperative that companies take the threat of such sites seriously and take appropriate steps to mitigate the damage,” said the statement from the committee, led by Representative Frank J. Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey.
A spokesperson for Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, told the Times last week that the company had changed its search engine to lower the site’s ranking. On Monday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, sent a letter to Google and Bing asking the companies to completely remove the suicide information site from their search results — a step further than any search engine has been willing to do.
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Members of the site are anonymous, but the Times identified 45 people who had spent time on the site and then killed themselves in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australia. Most of them were under 30, including several teenagers. The Times also found that more than 500 members of the site wrote so-called suicide notes announcing how and when they planned to end their lives and then never posted again.
In recent days, law enforcement officials in Uruguay, where one of the two men who started the site in 2018 lives, have launched an investigation into the site.
Families of those who spent time on the site and learned ways to die have long called on technology companies to be held accountable for directing people to the site, including search engines. The site has six million page views a month, and nearly half of that traffic comes from online searches, according to data from Similarweb, a web analytics company.
A Microsoft spokesperson said that in response to The Times' investigation, the company "took action" and "reviewed the ranking associated with this site in results," causing the site to rank lower for most related searches.
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Citing the Times report, Mr. Blumenthal wrote in his letter, addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, that the content on the suicide website “makes the world a dark place for too many” and that Google had the ability and legal authority to direct “people away from this dangerous website.”.
In Uruguay, where assisted suicide is a crime, Montevideo police have launched an investigation in collaboration with the local prosecutor's office in response to the Times investigation, said Javier Benech, the office's communications director.
In the United States, while many states have laws against assisted suicide, they are often vague, do not explicitly address online activity, and are rarely enforced.
Members of the suicide website who post instructions on how to commit suicide or encourage others to do so could face criminal charges. However, so far, no U.S. law enforcement officials have pursued such cases in connection with the site. Federal law typically protects website operators from liability for user postings.
Source of information: nytimes.com
