Bereaved mother: Social media firms ‘awful’ in search for answers on son’s death
Bereaved mother: Social media firms ‘awful’ in search for answers on son’s death
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A bereaved mother has said social media firms have been “awful” with allowing her to access her son’s accounts after he took his own life. Ellen Roome, 48, a businesswoman from Cheltenham, is seeking answers about why her 14-year-old son Jools Sweeney died in April 2022, believing it could have been an online challenge gone wrong.
Ms Roome said technology companies have refused to give her access to the accounts, which “could shed light” on his death, saying she requires a court order to do so. She has been campaigning for “Jools’ Law” to give parents the right to access their children’s online activity after they die, and the issue is set to be debated in Parliament on Monday.
Ms Roome told the PA news agency that she is particularly interested in Jools’s Instagram and TikTok accounts because her son did “a lot of” challenges which are frequently shared on the platforms. Asked how companies have acted after her requests for data, she said: “Awful. They haven’t cared at all.”.
She went on: “They’re not remotely interested. They don’t give a damn, and they just, quite frankly, don’t care… they all say it’s down to privacy that they can’t release data, well, that’s ridiculous, because they can redact people’s data.
“I don’t need to see who said what, I want to know whether it was some kind of blackmail? Was it sextortion? Was it an online challenge?. “But my child had no mental health issues offline, he wasn’t being bullied.”. Jools was discovered unconscious in his bedroom.
