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Sanctioned Suicide
The letters SS in all-caps in a white serif font on a black background.
Logo
Screenshot
A purple themed forum. At the top is a purple bar with the text "SanctionedSuicide" on the left side and log-in and registration buttons on the right side. On the left are buttons for "Forums" (which is selected), "Rules & Info", and "Tickets". There are four sections in the middle which include: "News & Announcements", "Suicide Discussion", "Recovery", and "Offtopic". Various scenes of nature are greyed out, and user icons are blacked out. On the right are sections for "Staff online", "New Threads", "Forum statistics", and "Donations".
Screenshot of Sanctioned Suicide on May 11, 2022, with various scenes of nature greyed out
Type of site
Internet forum
Available inEnglish
Founder(s)
  • Diego Joaquín Galante
  • Lamarcus Small
RegistrationOptional[a]
LaunchedMarch 18, 2018; 6 years ago (2018-03-18)
Current statusOnline

Sanctioned Suicide (SS) is an internet forum known for its open discussion and encouragement of suicide and suicide methods.[2][3][4] The forum was founded on March 18, 2018, by Diego Joaquín Galante and Lamarcus Small,[2] who go by the online pseudonyms Serge and Marquis. Galante and Small created the website after the subreddit r/SanctionedSuicide was banned by Reddit; both the website and the subreddit have been described as the successors to the Usenet newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday. As of October 2023, the forum has over 40,000 members and was reported to receive nearly 10 million page views in September 2023. Although the forum frames itself as a "pro-choice" suicide forum,[3] it has been widely described as "pro-suicide".[5][6][7]: 2 

Sanctioned Suicide has generated widespread scrutiny from news outlets and government officials for the encouragement of suicide by members on the site,[5][8][9] as well as the site's promotion of the use of sodium nitrite as a method of suicide, a previously obscure method.[2][4][6] One New York Times report found 45 adults and children who died in connection to the site, and a later report found dozens more. BBC News has identified 50 people who died in connection to the site in the United Kingdom. Access to the forum has been restricted in Italy, Germany and the UK.

History and background

[edit]
See also: Controversial Reddit communities § r/SanctionedSuicide

The r/SanctionedSuicide subreddit and Sanctioned Suicide have been described as the successors of the Usenet newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday.[10][11]: 2  On March 14, 2018, r/SanctionedSuicide was banned for breaking Reddit's rules on the promotion of violence,[12]: 285  prompting Galante and Small to create the site on March 18, 2018.[13][11]: 2  In January 2021, Sanctioned Suicide's original .com domain name was banned by the domain name registrar Epik, allegedly for the presence of minors on the site.[2][12]: 285  Following the ban, the site moved to a .org domain name.[12]: 285 

The New York Times investigation

[edit]

Journalists Megan Twohey and Gabriel Dance of The New York Times reportedly discovered the full names of the site founders during the October 2021 data breach of Epik.[2] Following the breach, Twohey and Dance obtained photos of Galante and Small that matched previous appearances of their pseudonymous identities Serge and Marquis.[2] When contacted by The New York Times, Small stated that he had no involvement with the website, suggested his brother may run the site, and denied his mother's name reportedly listed on police records.[2] Galante acknowledged using the pseudonym Serge on the forum but denied founding or operating it,[4] contradicting records on the site which described him as a co-founder and administrator of the website.[2] After the two co-founders were named by The New York Times, Galante and Small announced their resignations as administrators, writing that they handed the forum over to a member going by the username RainAndSadness.[4]

In an interview with the Poynter Institute, Twohey stated that the decision to name the website and the suicide methods promoted by the site were "two of the biggest ethical issues that we had ever dealt with".[14] Following discussions with medical experts, law enforcement, and families, The New York Times team chose to name the website and the preservative once in the report, so as not to potentially raise the website's profile.[14]

Galante and Small

[edit]

Diego Joaquín Galante and Lamarcus Small are self-described incels and run a number of incel and manosphere related forums where members' discussions have been characterized as condoning, downplaying, or advocating violence against women.[13][15] A September 2022 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate described one of the forums as the largest forum dedicated to incel ideology.[16]: 11  In response to a 2019 BuzzFeed News report which disclosed their connection to the incel forums, Small stated that the site's moderation was handled independently of the incel sites.[13] Sanctioned Suicide has been noted as the only forum run by Galante and Small that does not restrict access by women.[13][16]: 13  The New York Times investigation also reported that Small framed the site as part of a fight against censorship after the site received scrutiny for several deaths associated with the forum.[2] An October 2023 BBC News investigation identified Small and confronted him at his home.[17]

Site overview

[edit]
A list of threads on the Suicide Discussion forum with profile pictures and usernames blacked out. They read: "Reminder: Be careful when handling SN", "Tourniquet", "Guns/firearms megathread", "Pro tip for measuring 50ml", "I took ginger so you don't have to", "I found meto online for pets w/o prescription", "Carbon monoxide megathread", "Exit bag and inert gas megathread", and "Chloroform"
Screenshot of the Suicide Discussion forum

Sanctioned Suicide . The site is divided into three subforums: Recovery, Suicide Discussion, and Offtopic.[18]: 4060  The recovery forum hosts recovery-related support discussions, the suicide discussion forum hosts discussions on suicide methods, and the offtopic forum hosts discussions on hobbies and other general interests.[18]: 4060  The suicide discussion forum is substantially more popular than the other two forums,[18]: 4060 [19] including both detailed discussions of suicide methods and encouragement to commit suicide, which users refer to by the euphemism "catching the bus".[10][16]: 13, 16  The site also hosts live chats and private messaging.[20] As of October 2023, the forum has over 40,000 members[21] and was reported to receive nearly 10 million page views in September 2023.[22]

To minimize legal liability, the site includes links to suicide hotlines and other mental health resources.[2]

Registration and userbase

[edit]

The ability to post and interact on the forum is restricted to registered users; registration requires that users explain in detail their reasoning for joining and acknowledge being 18 or older.[1] Small noted that registrants who only sought the recovery forum would be unlikely to be approved.[2] An April 2023 paper published by the Association for Computing Machinery found that most new users were active only in the first few weeks after making their accounts and their first posts were more likely to be about suicide and methods.[18]: 4061–4062  According to an informal survey conducted on the site, half of the forum's userbase were 25 or younger.[2]

Sanctioned Suicide has been widely described as pro-suicide,[5][6][7]: 2  although the site frames itself as "pro-choice" and denies that it actively encourages suicide.[3] An investigation by the Australian ABC News noted that members have responded to attempts to direct people to hotlines or other supports with antagonism and accusations of being "pro-life".[6]

Deaths

[edit]

A December 2021 New York Times investigation identified 45 people who died by suicide in connection to the website,[2] with a later report finding dozens more.[23] In October 2023, BBC News identified 50 people who died in connection to the site in the United Kingdom.[21] The New York Times investigation also identified more than 500 threads where users announced their suicide plans and did not continue to post.[2][7]: 1  Among those identified by The New York Times was a 22-year-old woman from Glasgow who died by suicide after meeting a man on the site who had previously sexually assaulted and assisted in the suicides of several other women through the forum.[2] In December 2022, he pled guilty to culpable and reckless conduct with a sexual element and is reportedly the first person in the UK convicted in connection to the site.[5][24]

Multiple parents of children who died by suicide after spending time on the site have publicly called on the forum to shut down,[2] including a Facebook group with over 1,000 members.[3] The moderators of the forum have since restricted the accounts of dead users to prevent family members or police from accessing them.[2]

The New York Times also identified an Australian who died by suicide after members of Sanctioned Suicide taunted him and suggested he should film his death.[2] An investigation by the Australian ABC News on the same death reported that his family believes the forum was the deciding factor in his death.[6]

A November 2022, an ABC News investigation found that between 2017 and October 2020, there had been 20 suicide deaths from the meat preservative sodium nitrite[2] in Australia, an increase from zero deaths across the previous 16 years.[6] In 2022, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration reclassified sodium nitrite, restricting the sale of the substance to businesses.[6]

[edit]

Australia is the only country that criminalizes aiding or abetting suicide online.[19] Sanctioned Suicide's former domain name was blocked by the Australian Federal Police in April 2019 under the Telecommunications Act 1997, but enforcement was uneven and stopped after the site changed domain names.[6] Informal requests from the Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant to Google and Microsoft Bing in 2019 to delist the website from online search results were declined; both companies adjusted the site's ranking in its search results, but cited the need to balance safety with the open access of lawful information.[2][6] The Australian Online Safety Act, which came into effect in 2020, gave the eSafety commission powers to demand that search engines remove search results for websites that included instructions on suicide methods. However, the commission did not.[6] Following an ABC investigation and statements from the eSafety commission, Sanctioned Suicide proactively blocked access to the site in Australia and called the government's response "anti-liberty".[25]




In March 2020, the site was blocked from online search results in Germany under the German Youth Law.[2][19] Prosecutors in Italy blocked access to the site in June 2021 following the deaths of two Italian teenagers by suicide.[26] In December 2021, seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland to clarify what action could be taken against the site under U.S. law.[4][27] Following a statement from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Bing responded by lowering the ranking of the site in its search results,[4] however both Google and Bing declined requests to remove the site from search results absent a legal requirement.[2] While many U.S. states have laws against assisting suicide, federal law provides immunity from liability for web operators for most user-generated content.[2] April Foreman, a psychologist on the executive board of the American Association of Suicidology, argued that rather than block the site, better systems of support for people with suicidal ideation need to be created.[3]

Following the October 2023 BBC News investigation, several British ISPs, including Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, BT and Virgin Media, announced that the site would be blocked on default safety controls.[17] Administrators for the site partially restricted access to the site in the United Kingdom after being contacted by the British digital regulatory agency Ofcom.[28] A banner on the site announced that new users from the UK will not be able to access content on the website that violates the Online Safety Act.[28] In addition, audio streaming service Spotify disabled the site's Spotify social login, which the company states was added by a third party developer without their knowledge.[17] In response to reactions in the UK, Small made a post on the web forum Kiwi Farms stating that restricting access to the site or "harass[ing] me isn't going to solve the mental health crisis".[17]

In response to The New York Times investigation, Uruguayan law enforcement launched an investigation against Galante, who resides in Uruguay.[4] However, sources from the prosecutor's office stated that "it is very difficult to establish a crime"[b] since Uruguayan law requires personal involvement.[29]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ While parts of the site can be viewed without an account, registration is required to post and interact with other forum members.[1]
  2. ^ Spanish: "es muy difícil que haya un delito"

References

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  1. ^ a b Lekkas, Damien; Jacobson, Nicholas C. (2024-08-20). "Breaking the silence: Leveraging social interaction data to identify high-risk suicide users online using network analysis and machine learning". Scientific Reports. 14. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-70282-0.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Twohey, Megan; Dance, Gabriel J. X. (2021-12-09). "Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Gale A686537417. Archived from the original on 2023-02-08. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  3. ^ a b c d e Love, Shayla (2020-11-19). "People Are Dying After Joining a 'Pro-Choice' Suicide Forum". Vice News. Archived from the original on 2022-12-28. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Dance, Gabriel J. X.; Twohey, Megan (2021-12-21). "Lawmakers Urge Big Tech to 'Mitigate Harm' of Suicide Site and Seek Justice Inquiry". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-02-13. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  5. ^ a b c d Delaney, James (2022-12-22). "First conviction for man who encouraged women on website to take own lives". STV News. Archived from the original on 2023-02-15. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Bridges, Alicia (2022-11-15). "There is a pro-suicide website linked to deaths in Australia. Getting it shut down is not so simple". ABC News. Archived from the original on 2023-02-20. Retrieved 2023-02-20.
  7. ^ a b c Alvarez, Mike (2022-05-31). "'Life is about trying to find a better place to live': Discourses of dwelling in a pro-recovery suicide forum". Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare. 6 (1): 10437. doi:10.4081/qrmh.2022.10437. ISSN 2532-2044. PMC 10336861. PMID 37441057.
  8. ^ McGarvey, Emily (2021-05-08). "Mother speaks out against suicide forum after son's death". BBC Northern Ireland. Archived from the original on 2023-02-15. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  9. ^ Bucher, Merideth (2019-09-23). "Shawn's Law; a bill to combat aided suicide". WITF. Archived from the original on 2023-02-28. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  10. ^ a b Brown, Jennings (2016-12-05). "The Strange Legacy Of The Internet's First Sanctioned Suicide Forum". Vocativ. Archived from the original on 2023-02-10. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  11. ^ a b Dilkes, Jane (2022-06-01). "Quantifying Changes in Language to Evaluate the Social and Psychological Effect of Participation in a Pro-Choice Suicide Forum". Workshop Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2022: 69. doi:10.36190/2022.69.
  12. ^ a b c Dilkes, Jane (2022). The social and psychological work of metaphor: a corpus linguistic investigation (PhD thesis). University of Birmingham.
  13. ^ a b c d Nashrulla, Tasneem (2019-06-06). "Incels Are Running An Online Suicide Forum That Was Blamed For A Young Woman's Death". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on 2023-02-10. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  14. ^ a b Allen, Barbara (16 December 2021). "How The New York Times handled life-or-death ethical issues while reporting on a popular suicide website". Poynter. Archived from the original on 2 December 2022. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
  15. ^ Lorenz, Taylor (2022-09-23). "The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2023-02-13. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  16. ^ a b c Ahmed, Imran (2022-09-23). "The Incelosphere: Exposing pathways into incel communities and the harms they pose to women and children" (PDF). Center for Countering Digital Hate. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-02-13. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  17. ^ a b c d Crawford, Angus; Smith, Tony (2023-11-01). "Broadband providers block suicide website linked to 50 deaths". BBC News. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  18. ^ a b c d Sartori, Elisa; Pajola, Luca; Da San Martino, Giovanni; Conti, Mauro (2023-04-30). "The Impact of Covid-19 on Online Discussions: The Case Study of the Sanctioned Suicide Forum". WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. WWW '23. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 4060–4064. doi:10.1145/3543507.3583879. ISBN 978-1-4503-9416-1. S2CID 258333709.
  19. ^ a b c Fisher, Aaron (2024). "Closing the Online Suicide Assistance Loophole: How to Reduce the Harm of Pro-Suicide Websites". New York University Journal of Legislation & Public Policy. 26 (1): 273–307. ISSN 1094-513X – via HeinOnline.
  20. ^ Gutierrez, Lisa (2022-03-06). "These Kansas Citians died by suicide. A website showed them how, and it's all legal". The Kansas City Star. Retrieved 2023-07-23.
  21. ^ a b Crawford, Angus; Smith, Tony (2023-10-24). "'Failure to act' on suicide website linked to 50 UK deaths". BBC News. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  22. ^ Dance, Gabriel J. X.; Twohey, Megan (2022-11-02). "Bill Outlawing Online Suicide Assistance Would Open Sites to Liability". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-02-15. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  23. ^ Dance, Gabriel J. X.; Twohey, Megan (2022-11-02). "Bill Outlawing Online Suicide Assistance Would Open Sites to Liability". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 15, 2023. Retrieved 2023-03-10.
  24. ^ "Man jailed for trying to get student to take to her own life". BBC News. 2022-12-22. Retrieved 2023-08-05.
  25. ^ Bridges, Alicia (2022-11-21). "A pro-suicide website linked to deaths is now blocked to Australians, but not because of the families who spoke out". ABC News. Archived from the original on 2023-02-10. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  26. ^ "Site blocked for helping youngsters to kill themselves - English". ANSA. 2021-06-07. Archived from the original on 2023-02-10. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
  27. ^ Schnell, Mychael (2021-12-21). "Lawmakers call on tech firms to take threat of suicide site seriously, limit its visibility". The Hill. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  28. ^ a b Smith, Tony; Crawford, Angus (2023-11-10). "Suicide forum blocked to most UK users after Ofcom pressure". BBC News. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  29. ^ "Fiscalía investigará a uruguayo presuntamente vinculado a web que promociona el suicidio" [Prosecutor's Office will investigate a Uruguayan allegedly linked to a website that promotes suicide]. Montevideo Portal (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 20 February 2023. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
  30. ^ Mosleh, Omar (2024-01-31). "Users of this online forum counsel each other to take their own lives. Inside the Sanctioned Suicide community". Toronto Star. Retrieved 2024-06-01.

Further reading

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