A summer 2026 survey by the MRF of 1,825 children from 21 UK schools found that one in three were exposed to high-risk suicide, self-harm, depression or eating disorder content on major social media platforms in the week before they were surveyed. The survey also found that 7% had seen content that made suicidal thoughts seem normal, appealing, or cool.
The death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl after she was served suicide content on TikTok has prompted renewed calls for UK watchdogs to crack down on toxic social media feeds. Concerns about Adriana's wellbeing were first raised on 31 December 2025, when a monitoring system on her school-issued tablet alerted staff to a search related to a method of death.
Burrows stated that regulators are very slow to acknowledge that there are risks of criminal action, child grooming and also some of these issues of the way the algorithms feed suicide and self-harm material, adding that trust they can clean up their own services is simply not there and that anything less is a dereliction of the duty of a regulator.
An inquest heard that the teenager's death had a devastating effect on those close to her and that her devices revealed she had viewed a number of videos and images related to suicide on TikTok in the week preceding her death.
Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the MRF, said that the three-quarters of teens who are still seeing high-risk suicide, self-harm and depression content saw it on TikTok.