A few months ago I stumbled across a TikTok series. A distraught older sister. A younger brother who’d committed suicide. And an online girlfriend who had allegedly coerced him – and several others – into taking their own lives. According to the video creator, this was the girl’s modus operandi: target vulnerable people on Roblox, form relationships with them over Discord and find ways to convince them to kill themselves, often on camera. I can’t verify the videos’ claims, but it was a story I felt I’d heard many times before.
A young person falls into an intense, online relationship. That person commits suicide. Someone close to the youngster becomes convinced that the other party’s sole goal is to drive people to suicide. Of course, verbal pressure alone, in any form, isn’t enough to convince a person who’s otherwise OK to take their life. The targets in these cases are almost certainly vulnerable already. But still – the abuser, for lack of a better term, isn’t without accountability.
I wonder, what do we call such a person – this virtual “friend”? They’re not a cyberbully, they go far beyond that. The hypothetical woman described in the TikTok series isn’t a serial killer, at least not in any recognizable sense, even if she did supposedly provoke the suicides of multiple people. The words “narcissist” or “psychopath” aren’t specific enough. We have names for most kinds of killers, but not for the murderer whose primary tool is the internet. The law offers partial vocabulary – suicidal coercion, for example – but there is nothing to describe the relationship. These deaths aren’t about ideological recruitment. There aren’t physical assaults that take place after an arranged meeting. The online relationship is the mechanism, the person on the other side of the screen is the weapon. It’s an inverse of the “suicide by cop” – the vaguely glib-sounding “suicide by murder.”
The term I want to propose for these types of deaths is “mediated murder.” The medium is where the crime takes place, systematically: targeting, grooming, attachment, isolation, escalation and the terminal act, which the victims perform on themselves. The idea that online communication can cause real harm isn’t new. In his infamous 1993 Village Voice article “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Julian Dibbell described how a user of a text-based roleplaying game, LambdaMOO, deployed a “voodoo doll” subprogram to “force” other users to perform sexual acts within the game. If you’re not familiar with text-based roleplaying, all that actually happened was that users were described as performing sexual acts on the “rapist” and, in some of the attacks, on themselves.
The violation in question amounted to a sentence in what essentially was an online chatroom. And yet the victims experienced it as a type of violence nonetheless. A rape in cyberspace. This question – whether something that happens only in text can be real violence against a real person – has resurfaced in cyberspace again and again. To this day, we struggle with the question of what online speech is and isn’t dangerous, what dangerous even means.
Alt.suicide.holiday, a Usenet group created around 1990, was exactly what it sounded like – a newsgroup for the suicidal. By the early 2000s, multiple deaths had been linked to the group (though in a group for people openly considering suicide, that should come as no surprise). But not all the deaths were suicides. Predators had found the group.
One such predator was a man named William Melchert-Dinkel, a Minnesota nurse who had a suicide fetish. Melchert-Dinkel had spent years orbiting alt.suicide.holiday, posing as a suicidal young woman and entering fraudulent suicide pacts with its members. In some cases, he would ask people to angle their webcams so he could watch them die. In the end, Melchert-Dinkel claimed five people committed suicide due to his encouragement. Two of these suicides were confirmed: Mark Drybrough, 32, in Coventry, England, and Nadia Kajouji, 18, a Carleton University student in Ottawa. In 2014, the Minnesota Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on “advising” or “encouraging” suicide as a First Amendment violation. The court upheld the ban on “assisting” it, though. Melchert-Dinkel was convicted of assisting suicide. In this case, encouragement was protected but instructional speech constituted assistance. In Minnesota, if you tell someone to kill themselves, and they do, you haven’t committed a crime. If you tell someone how they should do it, and they do, you have.
The online relationship is the mechanism, the person on the other side of the screen is the weapon
As more of our communication and more of our lives are mediated by the internet, the distinction between “assistance” and “encouragement” can be useful legally – but it doesn’t help us understand the relationships behind them. The communication scholar Joseph Walther proposed that online relationships don’t just produce weaker bonds than face-to-face ones. Under the right conditions, he argued, computer-mediated relationships can actually be more intense. Without nonverbal cues, your mind fills in the blanks around the character of the person you’re talking to.
An analogy I like to reach for when explaining this dynamic is reading a novel. In online relationships, the other person becomes a character made partly by the author and partly by your own imagination. For many, this allows them to attach more easily – to see those people as a part of themselves, in a sense. But this mechanism cuts in both directions. When you’re reading a book, you don’t always connect with the character.
The same thing happens online. You may be familiar with the online disinhibition effect. It’s often invoked to explain why people feel emboldened to say the nastiest things in online arguments. Online disinhibition creates a dynamic where the person on the other end of the screen isn’t fully real to the user, so it’s easier to treat them in a way you never would in the physical world. Combine these two reactions to online communication and you have the conditions for mediated murder. On one hand, a predator who feels closer than anyone in the physical world. And on the other, a victim who is so dehumanized they may as well be fictional.
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