Illustration: Grace J. Kim for Bloomberg
Social Media Victims Are Ready to Be Heard
A new Bloomberg documentary follows a team of attorneys representing families whose children have suffered devastating digital harms.
Last February, I sat on the floor of 19-year-old Kyla Palomaki’s apartment in northern Michigan for seven hours during a snowstorm. We started on the couch and then slid to the shag rug after she dragged a box of mementos into the living room. They were tokens of her relationship with Jordan DeMay, who had killed himself two years earlier.
Jordan, a basketball star and homecoming king, had been catfished at 17 by a hacked Instagram account, lured into sending a naked photo on the platform and then blackmailed, with the extortionists threatening to send that picture to all his friends and followers unless he paid them immediately. The first message — “hey” — had arrived at 10 p.m. Fewer than six hours later, Jordan was dead.