A few months ago I stumbled across a TikTok series. A distraught older sister. A younger brother who’d committed suicide. And an online girlfriend who had allegedly coerced him – and several others – into taking their own lives. According to the video creator, this was the girl’s modus operandi: target vulnerable people on Roblox, form relationships with them over Discord and find ways to convince them to kill themselves, often on camera. I can’t verify the videos’ claims, but it was a story I felt I’d heard many times before.

A young person falls into an intense, online relationship. That person commits suicide. Someone close to the youngster becomes convinced that the other party’s sole goal is to drive people to suicide. Of course, verbal pressure alone, in any form, isn’t enough to convince a person who’s otherwise OK to take their life. The targets in these cases are almost certainly vulnerable already. But still – the abuser, for lack of a better term, isn’t without accountability.

I wonder, what do we call such a person – this virtual “friend?” They’re not a cyberbully, they go far beyond that. The hypothetical woman described in the TikTok series isn’t a serial killer, at least not in any recognizable sense, even if she did supposedly provoke the suicides of multiple people. The words “narcissist” or “psychopath” aren’t specific enough. We have names for most kinds of killers, but not for the murderer whose primary tool is the internet. The law offers partial vocabulary – suicidal coercion, for example – but there is nothing to describe the relationship. These deaths aren’t about........

© The Spectator