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.
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.
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.
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.
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