Sixteen-year-old Carson Bride died by suicide in June 2020 after intense cyberbullying on Snapchat by people using apps to anonymize their identity. His mom, Kristin Bride, a Democrat in Oregon, found solace in Maurine Molak — a Republican in Texas whose son had died by suicide four years prior after cyberbullying on Instagram and GroupMe.
“I absolutely needed to talk to somebody whose son had died the same way,” Bride told NOTUS. “She really gave me hope that there was a path forward to live with this tragedy.”
The two women are now part of a nationwide coalition of parents who’ve set aside their partisan differences to demand restrictions on social media, a policy push that is gaining political momentum and putting the world’s largest tech companies on the defensive.