Hidden from coroners and the public: tech industry cultural contagion
March 20, 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
A coroner in Australia is currently examining the tragic death of Lilie James. There has been intense focus on her ex-boyfriend, Paul Thijssen but experts have said they are unable to confirm why he suddenly engaged in such a violent crime, followed by his own suicide. Reports are also examining the role of location tracking services and the way generation Z is living a social-media dopamine-fuelled reality TV lifestyle.
British coroner Andrew Walker wrote that online content influenced the teenager Molly Russell to the point of suicide. Could exposure to online content and the related culture have been a factor in the way men like Paul Thijssen and Kyle Clifford suddenly snap and go down this path?
If Thijssen and Clifford were both under influence from the same content, for example, Andrew Tate, could we call them a suicide cluster, despite the fact they were on opposite sides of the planet? Here is a suggested definition of a suicide cluster in New South Wales.
Suicide clusters have a number of different definitions (Johansson et al, 2006; Larkin & Beautrais, 2012; Niedzwiedz et al, 2014). A widely accepted definition is a ‘group of suicides or suicide attempts, or both, that occur closer together in time and space than would normally be expected on the basis of statistical prediction or community expectation’ (O'Carroll et al, 1988). The majority of studies exclude attempts at suicide (Johansson et al, 2006). Although there seems to be some indication that suicide clusters should involve at least three suicide cases, there appears to be less agreement about their closeness in time and space.
The people who created the technology
Before answering that, we need to delve into the culture of the engineers who create the technology. If it is not even safe for us then it is probably not safe for the public at large.
Looking at the Debian suicide cluster, I couldn't help wondering how many of the cases were examined by a coroner and did anybody submit any of the hidden emails to the coroner. After enormous email chains on debian-private, Frans Pop sent his resignation the night before Debian Day in 2010. It reads like a suicide note but we didn't know that until later.
I contacted Pop's brother in 2022. Pop's brother told me that some Debian and Ubuntu people came to the funeral, they took away computer equipment, they never told family members the "resignation" coincided with Debian Day and they never disclosed the debian-private emails to the family or the coroner.
DP: Hi [redacted], are you the brother of Frans? I am sorry for your loss. Debian has hidden thousands of emails about this.
Pop: Hi. Yes. Who is this?
DP: https://danielpocock.com/debian-open-source-volunteer-suicides-compensation/
Pop: This is quite shocking to me. I did not know anything about this.
Pop: Are you Daniel?
The cover-up of the Frans Pop suicide is symptomatic of the industry at large.
Silicon Valley overlords don't want to send lawyers to represent them at an inquest if they can simply sweep things under the carpet by maintaining a culture of fear.
The next death was on our wedding day and it looked like a copy-cat suicide.
In Australia, a coroner can talk about these patterns publicly. In Switzerland, where Adrian von Bidder died, the police help companies to cover up the cause of death.
Did Swiss police help Google and Ubuntu cover up a suicide cluster that included our wedding day?
Recording one: "this is going to get worse and worse"
Recording two: "you are going to be alone against us"
The Debian group has a a history of over 30 years of threats and intimidation, harassment and abuse.
Rogue employers have free reign in Switzerland
The man who makes these threats and the punch is an Indian. But it happened in Switzerland. Is it any surprise that colleagues are committing suicide? Swiss jurists told me this type of behavior is acceptable in the workplace.
Recording one: "I mean I don't know what makes you stay here after I am so abusive to you"
Recording two: the punch
Coercive control is a product of cultural contagion
Reading through the news reports about the lives of these people who died far too young, I see a way of life that is totally different to the way we grew up before social control media.
Journalists have gone to great lengths to write about a small group of men like Paul Thijssen stalking their former partner, but what about the companies who demand we install apps on our phones so they can track us more intensively than if we only used their web site? If we care about stalking, we need to confront all forms of it in equal proportion.
Paul Thijssen, like the British crossbow murderer, had no history of criminal conduct. Many of the men working in Google, Facebook and Twitter/X also have no criminal record but they have vast amounts of data about people at their fingertips. Any one of those men could be the next wildcard.
Some women spend more time taking selfies and arranging them in their social control media profile than they spend on hair and makeup. The social control media platforms encourage women to present themselves like this and they know that men won't use the platforms if men can't find this type of content from the women they are curious about. In other words, the whole system has created a culture of stalking and despite the fact that Paul Thijssen's actions were incredibly sinister, Thijssen may be nothing more than a symptom of this culture.
What can a coroner do?
The coroner's office only becomes involved after the worst has come to pass and somebody has died.
British coroner Andrew Walker made headlines when he became the first coroner in the world to send warnings to Google, Facebook, Twitter and other large companies. The full report is published online by UK authorities. Walker took those extraordinary steps after the inquest into the death of Molly Russell.
Warnings from a coroner are not the same as orders from a judge or the government. However, if a company ignores a warning and further deaths occur in similar circumstances then there is a bigger possibility that managers could be prosecuted on charges of corporate manslaughter or gross negligence manslaughter for the deaths that occurred after the warning.
Coroners can give voice to independent experts
In the example of Frans Pop, I demonstrated one of the techniques used to hide information from the families of victims.
The job of the coroner is to bring information into the public domain.
The tech industry has made big claims about being open, free and empowering people. Companies operating in the open source ecosystem are notorious for making such claims. Elon Musk frequently boasts about free speech but the journalists asking about Musk himself found their Twitter/X accounts shut down.
The overlords do not want to allow any debate to begin. They seek to either censor their critics using technical means, such as account suspensions or they humiliate their critics with girlish rumors about "harassment" or "behavior".
One of the things that a coroner can do is to give a platform to the independent expert critics who Silicon Valley overlords are afraid of.
In 2021, Frances Haugen disclosed tens of thousands of internal documents from Facebook. She has been asked to testify in numerous public inquiries and parliaments around the world. The public attacks against my family and I started around the same time that Google sacked Timnit Gebru, co-head of their ethics department.
If Google is going out of their way to discredit critics like Timnit Gebru and I then there is only one reason for that: we were right about Google.
When society wants to prevent this culture from getting worse, when grieving families are searching for answers, why would you not give them the opportunity to hear from people who have already risked their careers to expose the inconvenient truth? Nothing could be more sincere.
Political leaders failing to lead on social control media
Political leaders simultaneously try to cultivate support on social control media while trying not to be the one who wakes the wrong dragon in Silicon Valley.
The nature of a politician's profession, how they engage volunteers and voters prevents them from being objective in relation to social control media.
This is a gap that needs to be filled by other institutions. Whenever the opportunity arises in the context of a coronial inquest, it is vital to allow some time for subject matter experts to contribute insights about the dark side of this industry.
Individual tragedies are part of a widescale mental health pandemic
The coronial inquest tends to focus on the specific personal circumstances of a death or a group of deaths.
We need to remember that these deaths are the tip of the iceberg. In 2024 I had a conversation with a schoolteacher who left the profession after working just one year. She told me it was all about the behavior created by social control media. Children have become unteachable.
There is similar conflict in the workplace. Employers are expressing concern about employees who stay up all night on their devices, they are tired when they arrive at work and they are disturbed throughout the day by notifications from all the apps. Employees have similar concerns about employers who call them or send them messages in their personal time. Many people feel like they are on standby seven nights per week without any renumeration for being constantly connected.
While the coroner is asked to focus on a specific sequence of events leading up to a death, the Silicon Valley overlords are thinking in terms of how they can manipulate the behavior of the entire population.
Did Silicon Valley listen to the British coroner?
Have another look at the video from the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights, 2018, where I predicted somebody undesirable would take over Facebook or Twitter.
Then look at the photos released by the White House on St Patrick's day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to know who Conor McGregor is. In November, a jury found McGregor responsible for a serious injury to a woman.
Are there men like Paul Thijssen and Conor McGregor working inside companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter/X, poring over the data harvested from all their subjects? Techrights seems to think so.
Does Musk listen to the British coroner Andrew Walker who sent recommendations to social control media companies about protecting the public? █
