New documentary explores online safety following Molly Russell death

A new documentary about the death of teenager Molly Russell and her father’s fight to improve online safety is to have its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival.

Molly vs THE MACHINES will also be shown in more than 50 cinemas nationwide on March 1 before it is released on Channel 4 at a later date.

The feature-length documentary will explore what happened to 14-year-old Molly in the lead-up to taking her own life after viewing harmful content on social media.

It will also examine Ian Russell’s efforts to overhaul online safety and the broader economic logic behind AI and big tech as it continues to shape, influence and infiltrate our lives.

Co-written by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff and directed by award-winning British director Marc Silver, it was made in close collaboration with the Russell family.

Prof Zuboff, author of The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier of Power, looks at how Molly’s life and death were shaped by algorithms.

She said: “We sent the most vulnerable and precious amongst us, our children, into the digital age darkness of surveillance capitalism.

“Our beloved ‘canaries in the coal mine’ were quickly targeted as human fodder for exploitation by a dangerous economic regime whose experiments on human behaviour produce the insanely lucrative new forms of population surveillance and control that have become the scourge of every society.

“This dark world is literally driving our children crazy as the pillars of safety, love and human relationships crumble around them.

“Now, this film reveals the brutal truths of this tragic era as a young girl’s death-by-algorithm unmasks the sweep of surveillance capitalism’s atrocities and all it has taken from us: privacy, autonomy, dignity, self respect, sanctuary, truth and the primacy of loving human relationships as the milieu in which our children flourish.

“The tech oligarchs have shown no mercy. The time has come for families to rise together and end this dystopia before more of us are trapped in the no-escape labyrinths of its madness and greed.”

Mr Russell, chairman of the Molly Rose Foundation, which was set up in his daughter’s memory, said: “There was a real striving in Molly for right and for justice.

“If she felt someone was out of order, it was like a switch – she would say, ‘stop it, that’s not right!’

“She’s not here to speak out today, so we have to do this for her.”