That’s probably the reality of an automated filter.
Online communities that promote self-harm are out there and they are making things worse. I’m less than convinced that blurring a few instagram images will do anything to make things better.
My point was that recognizing the effect of communities that promote a behaviour is not at all like blaming video games or rock music.
Promoting deadly self-destructive behaviour seems like it ought to be stopped. I just tried googling to find information about how to conceal anorexia but no matter what words I typed it in just kept giving me sites on symptoms, signs, and support. I type in instead “how to get away with starving yourself” and I get tips in the first page of search results (including one where “starve” is used as a colloquial substitute for “diet” as a seemingly mainstream message about weight loss, so there’s that to contend with). Obviously someone at google modified the algorithm to zone in on the word “anorexia” but I just have to use different words. This is difficult stuff to combat and I don’t know if we know how.
I think suicide and self-harm like cutting are very different categories of behaviour. In suicide if you can put someone off of it for an hour you’ll very often put them off of it for months or more. Most people who survive suicide attempts are glad they lived. I’m sure this sounds absurd to people who have never been suicidal or who have never worked with suicidal people, but I have no doubt at all that there are people who are alive decades later because the day they were going to jump off a bridge the weather was just too awful so they stayed home.
Cutting isn’t a one-time desperate act in the same way. For a person who already does it, a little inconvenience isn’t going to stop them.
