Focused on raising awareness about suicide and online harms, mental health organizations and speakers to host a panel about the importance of suicide awareness and social media safeguards.

In honor of Suicide Awareness Month, the panel was held on Sept. 18 at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at the Malek Theatre. Doug Vance, President of The Brazos Valley Coalition on Suicide Prevention, kicked off the panel with an introduction, quickly moving into a feature of suicide survivor parents John DeMay and Maurine Molak. Each spoke of their experiences with child loss through suicide and the steps they have taken since to hold social media companies accountable for their addictive, harmful algorithms.

Event planner, Liana Vincent, said the event focused mainly on the overlap between online harms and suicide awareness. Prior to the panel, the film “Can’t Look Away,” directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, was featured. It emphasized the dark side of social media and its long-term effects on users.

“Suicide deaths among 10 to 24 year olds have increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021,” Vincent said. “And so what we’re seeing is suicide rising in preteens as young as eight years old. …We’re trying to educate the public on online harms and suicide awareness.”

John DeMay is one of the many parents featured in the film, as he speaks about the loss of his son, Jordan DeMay, who died by suicide in 2022 after being targeted in an online sextortion scheme. He continues to not only advocate for legislation to protect children, but also urges parents to take action when it comes to ensuring the safety of their children.

“As a parent, you have … to monitor devices, especially with teenagers … and keep them out of their bedrooms at night,” DeMay said. “A lot of this bad stuff is happening at night in the seclusion of their bedrooms and the privacy of their own spaces in the homes, and the parents aren’t paying attention. We have to put … rules in place and just do what we can and be part of their lives and have conversations.”

The panel was moderated by Dawn Wible, the co-founder of Talk More. Tech Less, an education initiative furthering safe technology education in schools. Drawing from over 10 years of teaching elementary-aged children the importance of safe tech use, Wible highlighted the value of diverse perspectives when combating the ongoing problems related to social media and phone addiction.

“This is a public health crisis,” Wible said. “These products are not safe for kids. We’re really trying to empower parents, so that they can protect their kids better, and try to empower students so that they can make safer choices when they are in these online spaces.”

Wible drew from her own experiences as a mom, urging other parents to take action in their own homes, whether that be through becoming involved in suicide awareness organizations or simply having a conversation with their own children.

“I’m a mom … my boys are all the ages of kids that are experiencing online harm,” Wible said. “So not only am I teaching it, but I’m also living it out in my own home and learning what it looks like to talk more about these issues with my own kids and then to talk more about these issues in the public settings.”

Molak, co-founder of David’s Legacy Foundation, spoke about the loss of her teenage son, David, who died by suicide in 2016 following months of relentless cyberbullying. Since his passing, she has worked tirelessly with Texas legislators and other suicide survivors to pass legislation focused on child protection. This notably included the passing of David’s Law in 2017, which provided tools to address cyberbullying in educational settings.

Now, almost eight years since her son’s passing, Molak has shifted her focus from educational reform to firm accountability measures, as she continues to advocate for the passing of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA: a bill that would incorporate default safety guardrails into social media apps, giving parents the in-design tools necessary to protect their children.

“I’ve been … doing presentations to schools and community groups over the last 10 years and parents say the same thing over and over again,” Molak said. “They can’t keep up. It’s like playing whack-a-mole. As soon as one app pops up, three more pop up. Each platform is different, and all of the safeguards are different. We need Congress to require social media companies to put the highest safeguards on by default so that their platforms are safe by design.”

Last year, Molak helped start the educational initiative Parents for Safe Online Spaces, where 20  families shared their suicide survival stories — including child loss through addiction, compulsive use, sextortion and depression — in hopes of ensuring other families do not go through the same loss.

Together, they continue to push Congress toward passing a law that will hold social media companies accountable for their harmful, addictive algorithms that target teenagers when they’re most vulnerable.

“We go to D.C. and we walk the same halls that the big tech lobbyists walk,” Molak said. “We don’t have the millions and millions of dollars that these big tech companies have to employ all these lobbyists. But we have our stories, and we have our children. We tell our story and explain why we need to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, so no other children have to die from something that is so preventable.”

Expressing her own interest in the passing of the KOSA bill, Vincent explained that it’s not a censorship bill focused on content, but instead a bill emphasizing the design of these addictive social media platforms.

“It’s addressing duty of care, which means that online platforms would exercise reasonable care,” Vincent said. “It gives mandatory default safety settings, so when anyone … signs up for social media, then it would go to the highest safety default. And then addiction prevention so that we parents could disable the algorithmic recommendations.”

At the end of the event, Molak expressed the devastating loss caused by suicide and the imprint it leaves on survivors. She ended with a call to action to everyone present — students, faculty and parents — to make a stand against social media-driven addiction and self-harm and ensure that teenagers can feel safe in online spaces.

“We needed something positive to come out of David’s precious life … so that no other child … would have to endure what he did without tools in place to be able to protect them,” Molak said. “These are real stories. Real people. It can happen to anybody. We all had safeguards in place. … But it wasn’t enough. And it’s important … to hear and to join us in making these platforms safer for young people.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story mentioned that University Health Services hosted the event. It has since been corrected