hello, this is bbc news with martine croxall. the headlines: the brexit party leader, nigel farage, says he is not going to stand as a candidate in the general election. do i find a seat, try and get myself into parliament, or do i serve the cause better traversing the length and breadth of the united kingdom supporting 600 candidates? i've decided that the latter course is the right one. the government confirms the benefits freeze introduced by the conservatives three years ago will end next april. income tax will rise for the top 5% of earners

and there'll be increases to corporation tax under a labour government, according to shadow chancellor john mcdonnell. 33 people have been injured in a coach crash in france. 11 of them are british. delhi's toxic smog forces airports to cancel flights. the city's chief minister says the air has become unbearable. lewis hamilton is hoping to secure his sixth formula one world title in the us grand prix. he's currently racing in austin, texas, and needs four points to win the championship. now on bbc news, molly russell was just 1a when she took her own life. after she died, herfamily found graphic posts about suicide and self—harm on her instagram account. herfather, ian, spoke out, making headlines around the world and forcing instagram into a promise to remove the most harmful content. now ian russell has taken his message to the us to meet other bereaved families and find out if the tech giant has kept its word. the bbc‘s angus crawford followed him on thisjourney. a warning, you may find some of the details of this

programme upsetting. i expect it will be quite an emotional thing for me to be in the heart of silicon valley, given what's happened to ourfamily. that was her birthday, that weekend. and then two days after, she died. they are turning over our kids' lives to algorithms. children are literally dying every day. itjust needs to be shut down. this isn'tjust for molly, this is for every young wasted life. the government tells social media companies to take more responsibility for harmful online content. 14—year—old molly russell took her own life in 2017... the government is urging social media companies to take more responsibility

for harmful online content. these are companies that count their profits in the billions and they turn round and say to us that they can't protect our children. i think that's why molly's story has probably taken off, that it is a modern day nightmare. i am interested to find out what the attitude is in the states. i believe that although things have changed, i don't think they have changed quickly enough and i don't think that the companies have taken it seriously enough. i, personally, have had

as young as a seven—year—old who have had a full on attempt of suicide. free hess is a paediatric doctor that works in an emergency room in florida. so we are going to see a young adult male who is here for a suicide attempt. when did you start harming yourself? about the age of... i was 12. well, this one probably required stitches, but i didn't get it stitched at the time. any of these? this one probably needed stitches also. the numbers are rising rapidly, the ages are decreasing significantly. do you think this is

connected with social media? absolutely, absolutely in connection with social media. when she is not working in the er, dr hess runs a website. there is a blog that she regularly does, there is lots of videos with advice, so that parents can understand the sort of things their children might be getting up to online. we can go right on in here, and that's pretty graphic. it doesn't... that is graphic. it doesn't get much more graphic than that. no. and itjust continues on and on. i don't know that there is one picture here that is not showing blood or a scar of some sort. like a grooming process that is happening on these platforms, especially on instagram because you follow one hashtag to another hashtag to another hashtag and it is grooming that person to self—harm more, consider suicide more and maybe even take action on that. and so many of them are videos. # i don't understand it... 0h.

that's horrible, deep... a young girl, sitting in the bathtub, slitting one wrist, followed by the other. even i get teary watching it. it is awful. it could be one post that makes that child say, she did it, i can do it, too. i think i'm probably disappointed that there is so much material still just so easily found. i was rather hoping that the steps taken would have made it at least harder to find that stuff. i didn't think it would have all gone. well, i knew it hadn't all gone, but there's just so much of it there.

and at 5:38, we found her lifeless body. dianne grossman is the mother of mallory grossman. sadly, dianne‘s another parent bereaved by suicide and she goes into schools and gives extraordinary talks to quite young children there. i remember when i went to kansas city, missouri, one building, one high school, had nine suicides in one year. 0ne building. nine children. hindsight is cruel. hindsight is very cruel. that's the toughest thing to cope with, isn't it? yes, it is. i share that people think that the worst day of my life was the day that she died and i always say, no, it's the day before. it was the day before. there's a million things you wish you'd done differently. ijust think it wasn't in the forefront of my mind, like, when i think about it,

it isjust if i could stress to parents, it's. .. you just don't know what you don't know. it'sjust, you don't know, and everybody likes to say, not my kid, not my kid, my kid would never... my kid would never... and i think the studies show that we are all so wrong. but please, just for me, will you put your hands up if you will promise me you will always remember to look after yourself and your friends whenever possible?

that's a great comfort. thank you very much. molly looked up things on the internet about being depressed and being anxious, so anxiety, depression and being sad, to try and find an answer. i think it's bad when people use it in the wrong way and use it for cyber bullying when that is not what it is for. ijust don't really want to be a part of it. i don't want to risk anything. you can do something when you're about 12 on social media and it can ruin yourentire life. a lot of things that need to be changed is how people act on social media, and how people... like, what the guidelines are. like, some of the guidelines, they're just not really there. it's really only bad if you use it in the wrong way.

to find images like this, telling people how to self—harm, telling people different ways of self harming... "you can't fix me," with the scars in the background. the tech companies, they should see parents like you and i and invite us to their boardroom and say, help us help you. right? if i could sit down at the table with mark zuckerberg, right, i would ask him, don't look at me as a mother whose child died, look at me as somebody who's asking you very thought provoking questions, look at me not as an irritant, but could i make your product better, could i make it safer? what a great way for you to "at a boy" each other and high five

each other in the boardroom, if you actually put in infrastructure and a system to protect children. it's been amazing. yeah. keep up that work. you, too. it's a bit of a pilgrimage because molly could sing her way through all of hamilton and we'd got tickets to see it in london. she was looking forward to going to see it as a family. the january after her death, we all went along, missing one of us. that's available online. it shouldn't be. if you took that content, printed it out, put it

on a billboard by a town, that town would be incensed that that stuff was there. it's not right. hey! common sense media is a big american not—for—profit organisation and it's run byjim steyer. it's amazing to me that as a father you are willing to come out and do this. he's determined to make the internet a better place for people to use. this is a huge problem and the lack of responsibility of the social media platforms is absolutely mind—boggling. and absolutely disgraceful. they are literally turning

over our kids' lives — this is a matter of life and death in some cases — to algorithms. algorithms that are focused on one thing only, increasing the number of views and therefore the advertising revenue for that platform. it is beyond disgraceful and beyond reprehensible. we have said this to their face on multiple occasions and they have not risen to the task whatsoever, so it is clear to me that they can and should be regulated. they are much harder to find. i think that there are still some, even if it is one in a hundred, that stay on the site because we haven't found them yet. our technology hasn't become

as strong as it needs to be to find all of them. i don't think we will ever be in a place where every single image that violates our policies is off of our platform but it is our responsibility to get that number to as close to zero as possible. i am holding you to your words of eight months ago, we will remove graphic images of self—harm. it's still there, though. it feels to me like you have failed. we do remove more than twice as much content related to self— harm and suicide as we did before we made these changes. we find roughly three—quarters of it that gets taken down proactively before anybody reports it but there is very clearly still work to do. this work never ends. esther crawford is the founder of a new social media platform. part of the culture is eyeballs at any cost. i think that is one of the things

that has to change in our industry, that you have to have an ethical framework and a value centric perspective of what the product does to the end user. what's interesting about esther is she has based the ethos behind the platform around her 14—year—old daughter. her rule is, what we are designing and what we're doing with our platform, would this be safe for my daughter to see and use? it is hard, honestly, for me to hear you talk about this because i feel like this is my industry and we are not doing enough for parents and families and kids to keep them safe on these platforms, and we should and there is really no excuse.

if you could say to instagram's boss, if you could make one request, what would you say? i would say please make your decisions regarding safety on your platform while imagining your own child or grandchild sitting at the computer viewing that. i want them to put their mind there, i want them to feel like their child is seeing this and make decisions based on that. my hope is that anybody who really looks at it in such a personal way could not turn a blind eye. i think they are just not thinking of it like that. it is unfortunately being thought of more as, is this the most popular platform, making tonnes of money? other companies are making

tonnes of money off us. but in the meantime, children are dying. and that next child who dies may very well be their child or their grandchild if they don't step up and fix it. molly's death and more specifically the work that her parents have done in the wake of that tragedy, which i honestly can't begin to imagine what they have gone through, i have children of my own, but the work that they have done has raised an immense amount of awareness of an important issue. for me, personally, and for instagram more broadly, but also for the industry, it has translated into a lot of concrete changes, changes in policies, changes to what shows up where on instagram, more investment in finding people who might be at risk and those effects are real and they are important. so her legacy may be to make social media a safer place? i would deeply hope so.

he absolutely sounds sincere. ijust hope he delivers. because every week that that content is still there, and in the uk there are four more school age children who are dying by suicide, for example. there is a pressure of time. there is a pressure of time and the price is the price of children's lives. so, we are in manhattan and we are here to see the ceo of crisis text line. we can talk to you in a decision—making moment. am i going to swallow this bottle of pills? nancy lublin set crisis text line up and she is a real live wire, a real dynamo, lots of energy, lots of drive. in our conversations

with molly's age group, with that 14—17—year—old age group, 38% of those conversations explicitly mentioned suicidal ideas. it is the most suicidal age group that we see. igive up. i've felt miserable for too long now and ijust can't cope any more. it's my mum. she's got cancer. i'm trying to be strong for her but i am so scared and i don't know what to do. there are a thousand ways to start a conversation about your crisis. shout is here for all of them. text "shout" to 85258 because no—one should go through a crisis alone. such a powerful, optimistic message. i have come out so much more hopeful about the future than when i went in and i perhaps didn't expect to. there seems a solution that is already here that is helping people, that is connecting millions of people to the help that they need, and as well as doing

that, it is finding out more about the background reasons. here is the strange thing. i would love to be put out of business. my dream... i am not for profit. crisis text line, shout, we are not for profit. we are ngos. we are here for the public good. my real dream would be for us to go out of business someday cos people don't need us any more. yeah. unfortunately, right now, i'm in a growth business. pain. pain seems to be a growth business in both of our countries. it's just such a waste, it's just so sad.

alysia valoras is another parent bereaved by suicide. # because you're mine # i walk the line... her daughter, alexandra, ended her life completely unexpectedly. we thought we had a daughter who was happy. we thought she was ok, and inside, she was not. that is... you could be describing molly. so these were alexandra's journals. we found these on the bridge. that's just like a thing we found in molly's books, these big, scrawly, angry words. yeah, yeah. i can't do this. yeah, it wasn't the girl we knew. yeah, this is kind of hard. yeah. we haven't got as many notes

as there are in alexandra's journals, but she left us some that we found after her death. and she says, there's no hope for me, and then she says, i'll see you in a while, i love you all so much, have a happy life, stay strong. so, those were alexandra's words, too. yeah. the same thing. and i don't know, like, what happens? i don't know. how can you not think that your life is worthwhile? you know, i think she thought she was so broken that she was beyond repair, but if we never knew, if we don't know, then we can't help you, and you know, there's a lot of other kids out there that are just

like her and don't say anything. you know, because it is not ok to talk about, so i am glad it is starting to get talked about. is that one of the reasons you are talking? lam, yeah. i want parents to know and i want kids to know that this is what happens when you don't speak up. i think i'm 0k. very pleased to meet you. if you had had a moment to say anything or a message, potentially, for him, what do you think that would be at the moment? for mr russell? for mr russell, yeah. to start, i don't want to pretend that i could begin to understand what he has been through, but i have a lot of respect

for the fact that he has turned an incredibly tragic experience into a force for change, into a force for good and for that i am grateful. i think in many ways molly is with me every day, and i have wondered what she might have thought, had she still been alive, about such things. and i think she was such a force for good, she always wanted to help people, so i am pretty certain that she would be pushing for change so that young people were safer

when they were online and that if they need help, they can more easily find it. hello, it's certainly been a mixed weekend. sunday brought in something quieter, still some blustery showers around. this was the picture in east

yorkshire as the sun set on sunday. what about the week ahead? things stay unsettled, further spells of rain at times and it turns cold through the week. expect to see some frost and fog. for the here and now, we have some low pressure with us. it has been slow—moving for several days and not in a hurry to get out of the way. some heavy showers this evening across the south—west initially and they will be pushing their way northwards to england and wales. the odd rumble of thunder for some of those heavier showers. a few showers for northern ireland and scotland with some heavy rain developing in the east and that is going to be persistent through much of the day monday. five to ten overnight and could be a bit mistiness across parts of southern scotland and england too. flooding possible for aberdeenshire and caithness,

away from it since cold, sunny spells elsewhere and a few hit and miss showers. most be than heaviest for south—west england and through the south coast. one or two heavy showers here, but temperatures around ten to 13 degrees. pleasant in the sunshine, but look out for the heavy showers. wednesday, we see the wind is turning to more of a northerly direction. cooler, crisper weather to the north of scotland and toward northern ireland. reasonably mild down towards the south—east. a few showers here and temperatures in london, 13 celsius. that cooling trend continues into the midweek. 0n into wednesday, you can see the colder air mass sinking south across the uk. wednesday morning likely to start off with frost and fog around, especially when you have the clearer skies in the east. toward the west, a frontal system bringing the cloud and rain towards parts of northern ireland, south—west scotland and western fringes of england and wales. there could be snow fall

over the higher ground of the highlands in scotland. east with sunshine and temperatures will range between five to ii celsius.

hello. this is bbc world news today. i'm karin giannone. our top stories: protests in delhi as the toxic smog becomes so bad that even flights are cancelled. the danger level increases again. you can obviously see how terrible it is, and it is actually scary, you cannot see things in front of you. at least four people are injured in a knife attack at a shopping mall in hong kong during pro—democracy protests. the most profitable company in the world, saudi arabia's oil giant aramco prepares to make its stock market debut. in the last few minutes, lewis hamilton has won his sixth formula one world title at the us grand prix in texas.