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Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die​

By Megan Twohey and Gabriel J.X. DanceDec. 9, 2021
It has the trappings of popular social media, a young audience and explicit content on suicide that other sites don’t allow. It is linked to a long line of lives cut short.
As Matthew van Antwerpen, a 17-year-old in suburban Dallas, struggled with remote schooling during the pandemic last year, he grew increasingly despondent. Searching online, he found a website about suicide.
“Any enjoyment or progress I make in my life simply comes across as forced,” he wrote on the site after signing up. “I know it is all just a distraction to blow time until the end.”
Roberta Barbos, a 22-year-old student at the University of Glasgow, first posted after a breakup, writing that she was “unbearably lonely.” Shawn Shatto, 25, described feeling miserable at her warehouse job in Pennsylvania. And Daniel Dal Canto, a 16-year-old in Salt Lake City, shared his fears that an undiagnosed stomach ailment might never get better.
Soon after joining, each of them was dead.
Most suicide websites are about prevention. This one — started in March 2018 by two shadowy figures calling themselves Marquis and Serge — provides explicit directions on how to die.
The four young members were among tens of thousands around the world who have been pulled in. On the site’s public forums, in live chats and through private messaging, they discuss hanging, poison, guns and gas. Strangers seek out partners to meet face to face and kill themselves together.
Participants routinely nudge one another along as they share suicide plans, posting reassuring messages, thumbs-up and heart emojis, and praise for those who follow through: “brave,” “a legend,” “a hero.”
Though members are anonymous, The New York Times identified 45 who had killed themselves in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australia — and found that the trail of deaths is likely much longer.
More than 500 members — a rate of more than two a week — wrote “goodbye threads” announcing how and when they planned to end their lives, and then never posted again. In many of them, people narrated their attempts in real-time posts. Some described watching as other members live-streamed their deaths off the site.
Most of the narratives cited the same lethal method, a preservative used for curing meat, The Times found. By promoting the preservative as a poison, the site has helped give rise to a means of suicide that is alarming some coroners and doctors. Yet many public health and law enforcement officials are unaware of it.
“It’s disgusting that anyone would create a platform like this,” said Dr. Daniel Reidenberg, a psychologist and the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, a national nonprofit. “There’s no question that this site, the way they created it, operate it and allow it to continue, is extremely dangerous.”
While 10 of the identified suicides have been previously reported, the Times investigation reveals the broader scope of the deaths, the growing use of the poison and the influence of the site. Reporters analyzed more than 1.2 million messages from the site, examined members’ online histories, reviewed hundreds of pages of police and coroner records, and interviewed dozens of families left behind.
The site now draws six million page views a month, on average — quadruple that of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, according to data from Similarweb, a web analytics company.
Most members reported that they had experienced mental illness and were 30 or younger, according to a survey last year by the site. That age group roughly aligns with the demographic in the United States — 15 to 24 — that had the sharpest rise in suicide rate from 2009 to 2019, the most recent data available.

The NYT’s latest hit job backfires


The paper's attack on a suicide forum ended up driving membership​

Screenshot-2021-12-12-at-17.15.18-1024x333.png


“Most suicide websites are about prevention. This one — started in March 2018 by two shadowy figures calling themselves Marquis and Serge — provides explicit directions on how to die.”

On Thursday, the New York Times took on another niche online community in a sprawling, 6000 word exposé entitled “Where the Despairing Log On and Learn Ways to Die.” Its target was a suicide discussion forum that includes a section describing painless suicide methods collated from various guides online. The existence of such a website on the open web, where it can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, is no doubt concerning, but it is not clear how this Times story actually helps.

In the piece, the ‘Gray Lady’ reports that it identified 45 suicides “connected to the site,” thus implying that these individuals would be alive today had they not been “pulled in.” This is impossible to prove, if not unlikely, and it’s a logical fallacy the piece makes repeatedly. It alternates between voyeuristic accounts from grieving family members and a portrait of the “shadowy figures” responsible: two sociopathic incels who regularly evade takedown efforts to keep their death cult running.

The Times apparently made no effort to interview the site’s current members to better understand why anyone — including the handful of victims profiled in the piece — initially sought out the forum, which regularly receives four times more traffic than the National Suicide Prevention website. If its reporters did bother to dig a little, they would find that the forum is filled with users’ traumatic experiences in the mental health system, especially with suicide hotlines, whose operators are required to alert emergency services if they believe someone is a danger to themselves or others. Justifiably or not, failure here can erode trust, leading those most in need of such resources to seek out alternatives, and their perspective is worthy of inclusion.

Lacking even a veneer of balance, the piece presents efforts to improve the forum, such as increased moderation or additional recovery resources as cynical attempts to avoid accountability. It includes a few statistics along with emotionally-charged soundbites from experts, who explain that the site is “disgusting,” like “handing [members] a gun.” With stark black-and-white photographs and stylised animation, the story unfolds like a horror movie, complete with folk devils unveiled in the final act when their identities are revealed, along with descriptions of their homes and irrelevant, sensitive details about their families obtained through court records.

The Times’ investigation hinged on sheer luck, in the form of a massive leak of confidential registration documents obtained through EpikFail, a hack of a company that had previously provided hosting for the website. Using such information in reporting is legally protected given it is “in the public interest.”

It is unclear how the public benefits from learning the names and hometowns of the site administrators. Their inclusion does, however, make the story newsworthy, a potential concern given the similar and arguably more responsible piece by Vice News from November of 2020. But it is plainly irresponsible of the NYT to print the name of the website and a chemical used in many suicides in order to “fully inform readers of the dangers they pose.” This will surely just promote them further?

Suicide is quickly becoming a leading cause of death worldwide; as noted in the piece, there were 45,000 in the United States in 2019, a figure that has has likely increased since lockdowns. It is also a painful and difficult topic, especially when the young and vulnerable are involved, which is all the more reason these stories must be told with nuance and sensitivity, not in the service of an obvious agenda. There are clearly problematic elements about the website in question, but reporting on niche internet forums, or topics like incels and suicide is tricky; it always runs the risk of exacerbating problem by enhancing the allure of the bogeyman it helps create.

The website was already drawing in a weekly average of 50 new members. In the three days since the publication of the Times story, that number is approaching 500.
 
  • +1
  • Love it
Reactions: kebab, thecel and Albeacho
Also @master left without saying shit so its safe to say noone will pay for this website
 
  • Woah
Reactions: thecel
It’s in a fake news media must be true
 
Last edited:
  • Hmm...
Reactions: thecel
tl;dr faggot
 
  • JFL
  • +1
Reactions: Toth's thot and Deleted member 1627
Also @master left without saying shit so its safe to say noone will pay for this website
True, but there's still a lot of time to archive everything. According to who.is, the domain looksmax.org expires august 2024.
 
  • JFL
Reactions: WontStopNorwooding
True, but there's still a lot of time to archive everything. According to who.is, the domain looksmax.org expires august 2024.
Enough time to delete our accounts
@gamma @looksmaxxer234 @n0rthface
 
  • JFL
Reactions: Looks234, gamma and n0rthface
  • JFL
  • +1
Reactions: Toth's thot and WontStopNorwooding
  • JFL
Reactions: goat2x and n0rthface
its over
 
  • +1
Reactions: chaddyboi66
Back when these were the worst problems on the incelosphere. Brutal
 

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