The Power of Social Media: Amanda Todd’s Lasting Impression by Alexie Evans
A young, pretty girl comes home after her schoolmates beat her up and logs onto her Facebook account. Everywhere she clicks, all she sees are hateful posts about herself: “She deserved it,” says one. “Did you wash the mud out of your hair?” taunts another. “I hope she’s dead.” Fighting back tears, she locks herself in her room, grabbing a pair of scissors, which she uses to create another bloody line across the canvas of her skin. After months of feeling attacked, ostracized, and hated, the young girl feels she has no other option. She decides to take her own life. Amanda Todd was only 15 years old.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth across Canada, accidents being the leading cause. With a rate of over 500 youth suicides a year, why was Canadian teen Amanda Todd’s suicide so highly publicized, while every other teen suicide seems to be ignored? What makes her case so different than every other? Since her death, more than 600,000 Facebook users have ‘liked’ Amanda’s memorial page.
Amanda’s story is a complex one. It is a story that people can relate to, since many young people are bullied or suffer from mental health issues. Christie Pflug, an 18-year-old student who has suffered from anxiety herself, says Amanda’s story is one that would get a reaction — whether that attention was good or bad. “Publicity is publicity,” says Pflug.
Amanda’s approach to telling her story via social media is something the public isn’t used to experiencing. It’s not every day that teens create a suicide note on a webcam and post it online for the world to see. With social media websites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook saturating nearly every aspect of modern life, it was only a matter of time before Amanda’s heart-wrenching video went viral. In fact, a poll conducted in 2011 by Ipsos Public Affairs revealed that 75% of teens have a Facebook page, and 27% of them admit to accessing their Facebook page continuously throughout the day. On top of that, 65% of teens who can access the internet through their mobile device are continuous Facebook users. Amanda posted her video on YouTube on September 7th, 2012, and the video gained over 1,600,000 views by October 13th, 2012, just three days after her death, thanks to the ability of Facebookers to share videos on their profiles.
When rumors and stories about Amanda’s promiscuity with a boy who had a girlfriend surfaced, her story took a negative turn, and many people no longer felt sorry for her. “Women all over no longer saw this girl as a victim of bullying — but as a slut,” says Pflug. Countless hate pages about Amanda Todd have been created, despite Facebook’s best efforts at shutting them down. Kit Harrison, a fourth year at Western University, is very opinionated on Amanda’s story: “[Her story] of why she killed herself [is] beyond fucking stupid,” he exclaims. “She thought it was a good idea to show her tits to someone on the internet.” Many people agree that Amanda could have done a lot of things differently in order to prevent receiving so much harassment. “Do I think she deserved the bullying she received? No. But do I think that she could’ve saved herself a lot of trauma by not getting involved in a committed relationship? Completely.” Pflug emphasizes.
Much debate exists as to if the media attention Amanda’s story actually had positive effects. Many like Janet Taylor, a Fanshawe student, believe that the media attention served to remind people that bullying is an issue that needs to be taken seriously. She says, “Teens go through a lot of shit and most of them don’t have anyone to talk to.” Taylor has a point — in response to Amanda’s death, a motion was introduced in the Canadian House of Commons that proposed a study of the scope of bullying in Canada, and for more funding and support for anti-bullying organizations. This motion also hopes to start the plan to conceive a national strategy to prevent bullying. In addition, Amanda’s mother Carol established the Amanda Todd Trust at the Royal Bank of Canada, which accepts donations to support anti-bullying awareness education, as well as donations for support programs for young people with mental health problems. Amanda’s parents did not want to hide the fact that Amanda’s death was a suicide, and believe that sharing the details is worth the public backlash if it means helping others who struggled like Amanda. Amanda’s father, Norm Todd, told the Vancouver Sun, “Amanda put the message out there to help people.” Carol also agreed that she wants the public to use Amanda’s story as a learning tool. ‘I have lost one child,” she told the Sun, “but know she wanted her story to save 1,000 more.”
Despite Amanda’s parents support of her video, others think that the way she chose to share her story may give teens the wrong idea and glorifies her suicide — “the message Amanda and the media has given is that it’s okay to make bad decisions because if worse comes to worse, you can escape with suicide,” says Laurier student Remy Cameron. Her story may also not provide teens with an alternative way of dealing with their issues; Kaitlin Verellen, a second year at Western, ponders, “if [she] was willing to put up a video that, theoretically, the whole world could see, why couldn’t she have told someone close to her? [It sends] a message to other teenagers that if you’re going through a rough time, the best thing to do is post a video.” The publicity the video received arguably negates the value of her overall intended message, since Amanda has become an object of vulgar humor and criticism, with internet “memes” being created about the story she told.
Laura Mckenzie, a student majoring in Psychology at the University of Guelph, has experienced first-hand the pain of losing a friend to suicide. When asked if she thinks she would have been upset if her friend’s death was so highly publicized, Mckenzie has mixed feelings. “From the awareness side it would have been a good thing,” she explains, “but so many people were hurting already I wouldn’t want to have it drag on.” Mckenzie believes that the topic of mental health is a very touchy one, whichis why the media chose to focus on how Amanda was bullied, instead of her struggles with depression. “There is such a stigma attached to [mental health and suicide] that when someone is found out to suffer from mental health issues, they are automatically labeled as crazy.” Just a simple search on Facebook proves Mckenzie’s observations to be true: when phrases like “stop bullying” or “anti-bullying” are entered into the Facebook search bar, pages with hundreds of thousands, even millions of ‘likes’ appear. However, when phrases such as “stop the stigma”, “mental health awareness”, or “depression and anxiety” are typed in, Facebook renders much fewer results, with pages hitting just a few thousand, or even just a few hundred, ‘likes’.
So, what can be done to raise awareness on mental health issues? The answer seems clear: use the power of the media to erase the negative stigma that comes to mind when someone says “mental health”. The media itself is responsible for many of the the judgements that are made about people with mental illnesses. When the news broadcasts a story about, for example, a person guilty of murder who is found to be mentally ill, it casts a negative stereotype that inflicts a heavy stigma upon the public. This negativity is the very reason why people suffering from mental health are scared to seek help, or don’t know how or where to receive it.
Amanda Todd’s story is proof that social media has a power that continues to grow every day — and it is a power that can be used for good. Changing the language in which people speak about mental health, raising awareness, and above all educating the public in order to avoid ignorance are all steps in the right direction; if the media can create taboos and stigmas, it can erase them as well.