Uh… I mean, maybe I’m wrong here, but as someone who has been in some pretty dark places, and who has known and cared for people who have attempted suicide, or caused intentional physical self harm as some means of psychological release, this smells an awful lot like bullshit.
All I’m saying is, I know several people who aren’t alive anymore because of self-induced reasons, and there’s no way in hell that simply “making it hard for people to find images of self harm” would have helped any of them–if anything, it would made it worse. People who physically harm themselves often do it from a place of hurt that is fed at least in part by feelings of isolation.
To put it another way, when dealing with a suicidal person who feels isolated and misunderstood, the last thing you want to do is apparently confirm those feelings. This is not advocacy for the “well, everybody feels like that sometimes!” response that is very common among well-meaning people, that’s a reaction that people have to someone experiencing something they don’t themselves fully understand and doesn’t really help. What I mean is creating a situation that makes people who already feel isolated, misunderstood, and/or alone feel even worse, and makes it even easier for them to justify the notion that things neither can, nor will, get any better.
No, this sounds like is what a bunch of tech industry cowards would do in order to try to keep things that aren’t “fun and marketable” off of their platform. These motherfuckers don’t care that girl is dead, all they care about is being somehow implicated in that death. That’s all any of these motherfuckers care about from the tech industry to health secretary–their own visibility. The platform is worried about being associated with something shocking and scary, and the health secretary needs to be seen to be “protecting children.” Since it’s literally impossible to blanketly “protect children” from suicide or self-harm, they’re both using basically the same strategy to put as much distance between themselves and the parts of reality that just seem to refuse to conform to their desires or expectations. You can be sure that on some level the people behind these decisions know damned well that they aren’t going to change anything, and that this postured ineffectiveness is just a cynical way to push the blame to literally anywhere else.
The massive surge in <20 suicide couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that so many young people feel like they never even had a future to begin with on account of their parents and grandparents taking literally everything that isn’t nailed down! They obviously got the idea by seeing pictures of people doing it on the internet, just like every generation before them! 
