he said, "don't worry, i'll have my location on," and he knew that i would like to know where he was. and i said, "oh, good, 0k." and he did say, "love you, mum." " love you. " a neighbour's doorbell camera captured the last known images of olly. the clues to understanding what happened to him next were found inside a parallel reality. the world of social media. it's this secret world where you can do and say exactly what you want. it was a world that we had no idea existed and that he was being attacked by it. they hunted him, tracked him through social media. it did nothing to protect him. it did nothing to protect him and without it, he'd still be here. it was like a sunday afternoon, wasn't it? and it wasjust, you know, we were just all going to go back to work and school the next day. ijust thought he'd be out until probably it started to get dark. it was january 2021. around 3.45pm, there was a knock on the door. he was back sooner than i thought, that's what i thought. i opened the door and there was a kid that we knew and he just said what had happened and i thought, "did he just say olly's been stabbed?" olly had been stabbed just metres from the home he'd grown up in. ijust screamed up the stairs to stuart. he came running down. then stuart didn't even bother putting his shoes on, he just ran straight across. but it was quite obvious the minute i got there, stuart was already there. stuart had fallen to his knees, he'd screamed at the top of his voice, he said, "my boy! my boy! — "nor- — but he screamed it. and so he's like that, very close to where i can see olly lying, and his feet are just like off to funny angles and his face is as pale as anything. i could see his wounds and i saw the amount of blood loss and i was actually knelt in his blood, so i knew he'd lost a lot of blood. and i... everyone kept trying to keep me away from him because, obviously, there's forensics to go through and all the rest of it. you don't realise that. but you don't think, think about that at the time. but ijust held his hand and i asked him not to leave me. olly died in the field where he'd been stabbed. the police began to investigate. this was a very unusual case from our perspective, we were taken away really, taken aback by the amount of digital evidence. it was probably, from my experience as a senior investigating officer, an unprecedented investigation in that respect. that digital evidence from mobile phones would lead to a murder trial. two boys, aged 13 and 14 when olly was killed, were convicted of murder. a 13—year—old girl admitted manslaughter. because of their age, their identities are protected. i'm marianna spring, the bbc�*s specialist social media reporter. i've been investigating the circumstances surrounding olly�*s murder. i started by talking to some of his friends about him. one of my last memories of olly, we were walking back from one of the fields, and me and olly were just talking, just about like our future. this is olly�*s memorial bench, placed where he was attacked. i had these like hammock things in my garden and i was doing like some aerial yoga on it. so you go forward and then frontward... and he kept trying and he kept trying and then on about the fifth go, he actually did it. there you go, you've done it. and then from that, he wasjust beaming. his smile wasjust like stretched across his whole face the entire day. olly�*s friends told me about what it's like growing up in a world where so much is posted online. you kind of have to think before you say stuff. like, kind ofjust like, oh, could someone take this wrong? or, like, could someone you know take this in the wrong way? even if it's, like, not even a hurtful thing, you just don't know how people are going to take it. if, like, there's people in beef or whatever, like, they'll kind of video them. like, it could be like with a weapon or something and just kind of like making them do stuff that's going to embarrass them. and i know it can only, sometimes it can get quite violent. this type of behaviour is called patterning and it's at the heart of what happened to olly. olly was part of group chats on the social media platform snapchat. in the days before his murder, a video was posted to one group showing a younger boy being patterned. what is patterning? for want of a better word, humiliation of a young person by other young people where that humiliation is then captured on social media, often by video or by images, and then it's shared on a wider basis. one boy in the snapchat group had shared this patterning video. another had added a series of laughing emojis. when olly saw all this, his reaction was to alert the victim's older brother, angering the two boys in the group. the motive for the disagreement, essentially. they believed essentially that that was olly snitching, grassing on them. and that was what led to the fallout, essentially, between them. when police searched the devices of young people during the murder investigation, they found they were adopting an alarming online persona. these will be images, or either selfies or images, of somebody holding a knife, somebody in sort of dark clothing, potentially with face coverings, balaclavas, hoods up. we saw a number of still images, particularly using instagram as a mechanism to promote these images. really portrayed this image of a wannabe gangster, for want of a better word. it's this secret world where you can do and say exactly what you want without any comeuppance. if they had been at school and somebody had overhead those conversations, something would have happened. but it's, they canjust be completely covered away, say and do what they like. the young people plotting to attack olly were communicating with each other using voice notes sent via the snapchat messaging app. police recovered almost 2,000 voice notes from their phones. some of the messages are shocking. "you got poison in the heart, fam. "olly, you're gonna die tomorrow." the two boys who had fallen out with olly then tried to recruit a girl to help with their plan. one posted this message on snapchat: @hatedzz refers to olly�*s username on social media. fam, this is the hated dzi, mr hated dzi, mr hated dzi, i'm gonna kill him. oh, and by the way, i'm setting up olly today. the 13—year—old girl who sent that message lured olly to the field where he was stabbed. she knew olly in real life, but hadn't met the two boys who killed him in person until the day of the murder. ...wants me to set him up. ...is gonna go and bang him and pattern him and sort. i'm so excited you don't understand. voice notes sent after the murder talked about destroying evidence and being on the run from armed police. we got chased by armed feds around the whole of reading, so now we're kind of wanted. there was armed police that jumped out and tried chasing me with guns and all that, but, yeah, i'll facetime you as soon as i get through the front door. there's one voice note that says something like, "the feds are after us, they're chasing us." was that true? no. that was completely false, completely fabricated. and again, we would say, firstly, it showed an absolute lack of remorse in respect of what just happened and what he had done. but also, again, wasjust really part of this cultivating of this, this image. these videos were found during the investigation. they give a glimpse of what some young people are seeing on their phones. given what we know about the young people involved in olly�*s case, was that if we were finding this kind of material on their devices, then it struck me that this is probably the tip of a very large iceberg. if it was just the tip of the iceberg, i wanted to find out more. what sort of content are young people being exposed to on social media? and do companies take action if 13—year—olds view and share violent content? to put this to the test, i began setting up a series of fake accounts across five different social media platforms. i wanted some advice to make them as realistic as possible, so i went back to visit one of olly�*s friends. this is the one here. there's pictures of us playing. ben was 12 years old when olly — his best friend — was murdered. how long have you known olly? since reception. so, when i was four, ever since. some of my favourite memories i have on my phone, a video of me here drinking ginger beer at one of his birthdays. go! ginger beer down. it's firing! olly got his first phone when he was in primary school. when did you first start using social media? from a pretty young age. i'd say about ten, 11. i don't really understand all of it but ijust had it. we told ben about our experiment. we've had a go at setting up profiles across the different social media platforms, instagram, snapchat, tik tok, facebook and youtube. this is ourfake profile. we're saying he's 13. he's not a real person and we've used a computer—generated photo. it's meant to be 13 years old so his birthday is ist of april, april fool's, 2009, so he'd be 13. ben helps me set up the accounts with that birth date, following things a typical 13—year—old boy might like. ben is a big rugby fan. would you ever look up rugby on snapchat, or not so much? i have seen some of it. the other thing we'd like to do is follow some of olly�*s tribute pages, so if you can show me the best one, that would be really helpful. brilliant. we will follow that one. i also followed some of the topics that other young teenagers follow on their accounts. drill music, cars, rap and pages against knife crime. but as soon as i searched anti—knife crime content, i got the opposite. over the next two weeks, our 13—year—old's account liked and followed what was suggested to it on all the platforms. on instagram, youtube and facebook, it was recommended content such as... people showing off knives. posts glorifying violence. and knives for sale. on tiktok and snapchat, the accounts were not recommended this kind of content. i told olly�*s friends about our experiment and asked what they've seen on their social media feeds. i don't know whether, like, that matches up with some of the images of knives you've seen on social media before. yeah. not really. not really like that, like, bigger knives. bigger? yeah. like, what kind of thing? i don't know, like, big rambo knives. wow. you know, even a bit like kind of a machete type. that's what's kind of been shown more than, like, kind of little pocket knives, cause i think that's kind of, like, i... more intimidating. like butterfly knives and stuff like that, i like, ones that actually look kind of more appealing, - i'd say. and, like, they'll be - like colourful or something and it's, like, oh... how do you feel when you see that kind of thing of it? just like, it doesn't really faze me as much any more. ifeel like, kind of around olly�*s death... obviously i was a bit more sensitive to it, just because it, like, it would be like a week after. and ijust see it and itjust, like, just makes me really upset. ifeel like now i kind of see and itjust doesn't really faze as muchjust of how much, like, i'm kind of exposed to it and just see it so much. all the social media companies say they protect teenage users. in particular, meta, which owns instagram and facebook, says it restricts what under—18s can see of "content that attempts to buy or sell bladed weapons." so why are olly�*s friends, and our fake account, being exposed to this kind of content? one person who can answer that is frances haugen. she's a former meta insider turned whistle—blower. she believes social media can desensitise people to violence. one of the things that happens with groups and networks of groups is that people see echo chambers that create social norms. hi, thank you for meeting with us. pleased to meet you. olly�*s parents want to ask frances why young people are exposed to posts like this on social media. we believe other parents need to know what we've been through. they are open and exposed to so much that is so bad. and you have no idea it's happening under your roof. we've known for maybe five i or ten years that social media doesn'tjust provide a channelj where hate can be delivered — it can also provide _ an incentive to generate hate. no one at facebook,| no one at instagram, no one at any of these social| media companies says i want overexposure to violence. but what did happen is these products are designed - as the sum of lots of little choices. l so they say a or b, a or b. and each time, the goal- is to get you to spend more time, view more ads, more revenue. - every time you click on something, an automated system called an algorithm decides what you might like to see next and recommends you content based on that click. frances is a specialist in these social media algorithms. she says they are what push some children towards more harmful content. all harms on social media are hyper concentrated. l the kids who are impacted by the eating disorders, i by depression, by violence, any of these things, - they're not going to be given twice as much of the content as the other kids, they're i going to be given ten or 100 times as much of the content. each of us only gets this . little tiny peephole to view social media where we see our own experience. - we don't see what. a 13—year—old sees. we can't know exactly- what content social media platforms were recommending to the young people _ in olly's case. but these images and videos of knives were pushed to our 13—year—old fake account. and they're strikingly similar to those the police found on phones they examined. the main thing that we identified was a bit of a fascination with weapons, particularly the two boys that were convicted of olly�*s killing. and one of them alone had a number of images of him holding, using, posing, demonstrating the use of knives. do you think that it's likely that these kinds of videos of knives, images of knives, were shared on platforms like instagram, like snapchat? from what we've observed in this investigation, absolutely. so we decided to test something else. how proactive are the social media companies at taking action when a photo or video of a knife is posted by a 13—year—old? our fake accounts all posted an image like this. we'd set the profile to private, so no one else could see it, except for the social media platforms themselves. when a post showing off a knife was shared on instagram, facebook, youtube and snapchat, no action was taken. but tiktok did remove it for violating its guidelines. that suggests it is possible to detect and remove this kind of content when it's shared by under—18s. new research shared with panorama suggests social media is a key factor in almost a quarter of crimes committed by under—18s. the majority of these were acts of violence that had started with disputes online. joe caluori heads up a research group that has been looking at social media's connection to violent crime. i think social media is a bigger factor in violence and the deaths of young people previously than we realise because it's not often looked into in great detail. after young people are killed, there's a police investigation, there's a court case, an inquest, and that's the end of it. i showed him some of what had been recommended to our 13—year—old as part of the experiment. i think that the priorities have been geared towards stopping sexual exploitation and extremism. but we've kind of ignored the growth of this violent content and the effect that this could have, especially on young males. joe's organisation carried out a poll, asking about attitudes to social media. when parents said they didn't want their children using private messaging apps, half of those who objected still allowed their children to use them. a lot of parents are kind of aware of the risks, but don't think it would ever happen to their child. it would happen to other people's children. but i'm not sure that they can really have that confidence. i went back to see stuart and amanda. what would you say to a social media boss who's watching this? if any of them could have been in the field with us that day, and saw what we saw, that's what frustrates me. i feel like they're being cowardly and not facing up to the reality of what's happening. i also think they're in denial. they've used our product but it's not our problem. you're feeding the problem. you are creating this. and my experiment showed something else striking. adverts promoted to our fake account included online courses, music and opportunities for teenagers and children. they were sometimes based on his interests and age—appropriate. that happened mainly on youtube, but also on facebook and instagram. it seems to suggest that data from young teenage users can be used to target them but then not to protect them from harmful content showing knives or violence. we asked meta, youtube, snapchat and tiktok to respond to the issues raised in this programme. all the companies expressed their sympathies for olly�*s family. meta said that they... and that they have... as they did in olly�*s case. snapchat told us... youtube said... and tiktok said... and that they will continue to build policies and tools... mps are considering laws that could force social media companies to do more to protect children like olly. this new legislation is called the online safety bill. i went to westminster to show the minister in charge the results of our investigation. what's your reaction to that kind of experiment? that's, that's not a surprise to me. we've seen some of the really dreadful stuff that is fed to young children and young people via their social media streams. that is why this bill is so necessary. stuart and amanda fear that the bill in its current form wouldn't have saved olly. the companies, they were supposed to self—govern, they've been very lax with it. ultimately, children should not be seeing what they are seeing through their phones. and these companies need to be held to account. olly�*s case involved content that might be legal but is considered harmful to young people. stuart wrote to the minister, urging the government to listen to olly�*s story. we are ordinary people caught in the front line fighting for our children's futures. as a cabinet, please listen to us as parents. thank you, stuart stephens. the legal but harmful stuff, we know what's, what's happening with that. we know the format it's going to follow in and what exactly, what is going to come into the bill. but it's not there yet. it, well, the bill will be law soon, and it will be in the bill by then. is there enough in the bill right now to prevent this kind of violent and hateful content, specifically within the legal but harmful realm ? yeah, because it's, it's actually very easy for these platforms to be able to detect the imagery that you've shown me. so, yes, harmful content, violent content, abusive content, it's all in there. how will you force them to do something about that specifically? i think it's easier because there's so much, like, technical stuff in the bill. i think it's probably easier to keep to the core principle of the bill. so the core principle is that children, the uk has to be the safest country in the world for children and young people to be online. the government says social media companies could face harsh penalties. they don't need to wait for the online safety bill. they can actually put what is wrong right now. if they don't, then we have the, we will have the power to issue multi—billion pound fines. 10% of their annual turnover. and make sure that people within those organisations are criminally liable. the minister says she hopes the bill will pass by the end of the year. it's been 18 months since olly was murdered in the field behind his house. for the horror that happened on that day, a lot of his friends don't go in the field any more, and we didn't want that because that's a place where they would all go and have a good time. if you can... we put the bench there then hoped that they would come back to the field, and then talk, and not talk so much about his death, but talk about his life. but also the reasons behind what happened to him and hopefully that will spark conversations at home and they'll put down their phones. your story was so good. one of our sleepovers, we wanted to sneak out. we tried fitting through his downstairs toilet window, but we were both too big to fit through it. well, i have like a lot of memories in this park because me and olly would walk back this way because we just live down there and we'd sit on that bench and just, like, chat about whatever and just look at, like, the stars. he was quite unique. he was his own person in a way. 100%. he didn't get influenced by people. yeah, he wasjust him, that'sj the best way to describe him. he did what he wanted and it was just funny. i you couldn't have a bad day with him in a way. i olly left our house on sunday afternoon for a walk to meet some friends. an hour and a half later, i was saying goodbye to him in an ambulance. social media's not guilty of the murder, but without it, he'd still be here. how are you? enjoying the bench. you've got olly�*s name there, and then you're all along the sofa. it's really good to see all of you on it. this is bbc news. i'm david eades. our top stories: the us capitol riot hearings, election workers speak of the pressure they faced from donald trump, leaving them to cope with abuse and intimidation. various groups come by, arguing and threatening with neighbours and with myself. so it was disturbing. it was disturbing. the hearing into last month's mass school shooting in texas, is told the police could have stopped the gunman after three minutes, but that officers put their own lives before the children's. the entertainer, bill cosby, is found to have sexually assaulted a 16—year—old girl in 1975. a civil court awards her half a million dollars in damages. tensions rise between russia and lithuania, over a ban
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