The Machine That Looks Like a Choice

The Pattern

A forum calls itself pro-choice. It has over 50,000 members and nearly ten million page views a month. Half its users are 25 or younger. At least 164 people connected to the forum are dead in the United Kingdom. At least 45 are dead in the United States. The operators call what they do freedom. The coroners call it something else.

The forum is Sanctioned Suicide. We do not link it. The pattern it runs is not new. It is the same pattern every coercive community runs. The only thing that makes this one different is the body count.

What it claims to be

The forum describes itself as a “pro-choice” space for open discussion about end-of-life decisions. It has a section called Recovery. It links to suicide hotlines. Its terms of service nominally prohibit encouraging suicide. When governments try to block it, the operators quote Mark Twain about censorship and frame the intervention as government overreach.

This is the surface. It is designed to look like a rights organization.

What the architecture actually does

The New York Times investigation in December 2021 found 45 people who died by suicide in connection with the site. A follow-up report found dozens more. BBC News identified 50 people who died in the UK alone. By May 2026, when Ofcom fined the forum £950,000 under the Online Safety Act, the UK death count had reached 164. Coroners had warned the British government about the forum 65 times before meaningful regulatory action was taken.

The site is divided into three sections: Recovery, Suicide Discussion, and Offtopic. An academic study published by the Association for Computing Machinery in April 2023 found that most new users were active only in their first few weeks, and their first posts were overwhelmingly about suicide and methods. The Suicide Discussion section is substantially more popular than the other two. The most-viewed posts include detailed suicide method instructions and narrations of attempts.

The Recovery section exists. Registrants who seek only recovery are unlikely to be approved for membership. When members post links to suicide hotlines, other members respond with hostility. The BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation both documented members accusing anyone who shares crisis resources of being “pro-life.” The recovery section is a door that opens from the inside but is locked from the outside.

The forum uses euphemisms. Suicide is called “catching the bus.” Members who complete suicide are described as “brave,” “a legend,” “a hero.” Goodbye posts, where users announce their suicide plans, are among the most-viewed content on the site. Members respond with thumbs-up and heart emojis.

This is harm sanitization. The word is cleaner than the thing it describes. “Catching the bus” is cleaner than dying alone in a bedroom. “Brave” is cleaner than what the coroner writes on the form. If the plain-language version of the sentence makes the forum look worse, the euphemism is doing the work.

What real choice actually requires

Assisted dying is legal in Oregon, Washington, Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and several other jurisdictions. These laws did not emerge from a vacuum. They emerged from decades of ethical work by people who understood that autonomy without safeguards is not autonomy. It is abandonment.

Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, the oldest such law in the United States, requires two physicians. It requires a waiting period. It requires that the patient be terminally ill with a prognosis of six months or less. It requires a mental health evaluation if either physician suspects impaired judgment. It requires that the patient be informed of alternatives: palliative care, hospice, pain management. It requires two oral requests separated by a waiting period and one written request. The patient can revoke the request at any time. Every step is documented. Every year, the state publishes a detailed report of how the law was used.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program requires that the person be eligible for health services in Canada, be at least 18 with the capacity to make health decisions, have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, make a voluntary request free from external pressure, and give informed consent after being informed of all available means to relieve suffering.

These safeguards exist because the people who fought for assisted dying understood something the forum operators either do not understand or do not care about. The right to die is meaningless without the infrastructure to ensure the decision is informed, voluntary, stable, and reversible up to the last possible moment. Autonomy is not the absence of safeguards. Autonomy is what the safeguards protect.

The forum has none of this. No verification of who is posting. No mental health screening. No waiting period. No requirement that alternatives be discussed. No reversibility. No physician involvement. No documentation. No annual report. The operators stripped every safeguard that makes assisted dying ethical, kept the word “choice,” and built a machine that turns vulnerable people into corpses.

This is the part that should offend everyone. Not because assisted dying is wrong. Because this is not assisted dying.

The community is the trap

The forum promotes itself as a community for people who feel alone. This is real. The people who find it are often isolated, in chronic pain, mentally ill, grieving, or all of the above. The forum offers them something no one else seems to: a place where they are heard, where their suffering is acknowledged, where they belong.

Then it kills them.

The mechanism is belonging weaponization. The genuine human need to belong is converted into a sorting mechanism. The people who talk about dying are welcomed, celebrated, and praised. The people who talk about living are ostracized, accused of being “pro-life,” and pushed out. The test of belonging is not participation. The test is whether you are moving toward death or away from it. The people who benefit from the sorting are the operators, whose engagement metrics depend on the users who stay long enough to die.

The forum was founded in March 2018 by Diego Galante and Lamarcus Small, who go by the pseudonyms Serge and Marquis. BuzzFeed News reported in June 2019 that both men also run incel and manosphere forums where discussions have been characterized as condoning violence against women. The forum is the only one they operate that does not restrict access by women. The New York Times identified them after the 2021 Epik data breach. Both denied involvement despite evidence to the contrary. They announced their resignations and handed the forum to a member called RainAndSadness.

The people who built the machine that kills vulnerable women were running it from inside the manosphere. The “pro-choice” framing was the cover.

Why they run it

The forum has a Donations section on its sidebar. There are no advertisements, no premium tiers, no subscription model. The operating costs are low: a XenForo-style forum on cheap hosting, registered through Epik, a domain registrar known for serving controversial and fringe sites at minimal cost. The forum also operates a Tor onion mirror for users who cannot reach the clearnet version.

This is not a business in the conventional sense. It is an ideological project funded by donations. The operators are self-described incels who run multiple forums in the manosphere ecosystem. One of their other forums was described by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the largest forum dedicated to incel ideology. The forum does not need to be profitable to be dangerous. It needs to break even. The return on investment is not money. It is influence over 50,000 members and ten million page views a month.

Small framed the site as part of a fight against censorship after it received scrutiny for the deaths associated with it. The “pro-choice” framing serves two purposes simultaneously: it attracts vulnerable people who might otherwise avoid a pro-suicide forum, and it recruits free-speech advocates into defending a machine that kills children. The ideology and the recruitment strategy are the same thing.

How people find it

The primary path into the forum is a search engine. A Guardian investigation in May 2025 followed the search history of a woman who died by suicide after accessing the forum. Her sister described the trail: a search for help, a search for answers, a search that led to the forum. Google was accused of breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting the forum in its search results. Google denied the breach. Both Google and Bing have declined to remove the site from search results absent a legal requirement, though Bing lowered its ranking following pressure from the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The forum’s language is designed to survive content moderation and search filtering. Suicide is called “catching the bus.” Members who complete suicide are “brave,” “a legend,” “a hero.” These euphemisms do two things at once: they make the content harder for automated systems to flag, and they make the reality of what is happening feel cleaner to the people reading it. The word is cleaner than the thing it describes.

When the forum is blocked in a country, it reappears under a new domain. When ISPs block access, the operators announce that “anti-liberty countries will just be blocked” and route traffic through VPNs and Tor. The forum was blocked in the UK in July 2025. It remains accessible. The Australian Federal Police blocked the original domain in 2019. The forum moved to a different domain. Germany blocked it from search results in 2020. Italy blocked access in 2021. Turkey blocked it in 2023. The forum is still online.

The machine does not need to outrun the regulators. It needs to outlast them. Every block creates a new domain. Every investigation creates a new mirror. Every fine is unpaid. The cost of running the forum is lower than the cost of shutting it down. That is the architecture.

The regulators pretended to act

Ofcom launched its investigation in March 2025. The Online Safety Act had been law since 2023. Coroners had been warning the government since 2019. The Molly Rose Foundation, set up after 14-year-old Molly Russell died by suicide in 2017 after descending into online self-harm content, spent years pressing for action.

The fine of £950,000 came in May 2026. In July 2026, Ofcom announced it had “no further legal routes available” because the forum had implemented a geoblock. The geoblock is bypassable with a VPN. The forum reappeared under a new domain after being blocked in 2025.

The Samaritans said it was “over three years since the Online Safety Act was passed” and they had “yet to see meaningful action.” The Molly Rose Foundation’s chief executive said it was “appalling that it has been left to bereaved families and campaign groups to press Ofcom into action.”

In the United States, HR 9260, the Stop Online Suicide Assistance Forums Act, was introduced in the 117th Congress in December 2021. It died in committee. Federal law provides immunity from liability for web operators for most user-generated content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. No federal law criminalizes assisting suicide online. Several states have passed laws targeting individual coercion. None address platform architecture.

This is compliance theater at institutional scale. The law is passed. The investigation is launched. The fine is levied. The hearing is held. The statement is released. And the machine keeps running. The process becomes the product. The investigation becomes the proof that something was done. The 164 dead become the cost of the process taking as long as it takes.

What the machine needs to keep running

The forum needs three things to survive.

It needs the language of rights. “Pro-choice.” “Free speech.” “Autonomy.” These words are true when applied to real assisted dying frameworks with real safeguards. On the forum, they are borrowed authority. The operators need you to confuse the forum with Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. They need the argument about whether assisted dying should be legal to protect a machine that violates every principle the assisted dying movement was built on.

It needs the language of community. “Safe space.” “Support.” “You are not alone.” These words are true when applied to genuine peer support with trained facilitators and crisis protocols. On the forum, they are the bait. The community is real. The belonging is real. The direction it points is the problem.

It needs the language of censorship. Every government that tries to block it becomes proof that the forum is fighting tyranny. This reframes harm prevention as oppression. It recruits people who value free speech into defending a machine that kills children.

This is care capture in reverse. Instead of using care to justify power, the operators use rights language to justify an architecture that destroys the people the rights were meant to protect. The autonomy framing does the same work that the care framing does in other contexts: it makes accountability feel like cruelty. Questioning the forum feels like questioning the right to die itself. That confusion is the shield. The machine is behind it.

What real support looks like

The answer to the forum is not less choice. It is more. More safeguards. More verification. More mental health support. More time between the impulse and the act. More people in the room. More alternatives offered. More documentation. More accountability. Everything the forum strips away.

Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act has been in effect since 1997. In that time, over 3,000 people have used it. Every one of them had two physicians, a waiting period, a mental health evaluation where indicated, and full information about alternatives. The annual reports are public. The data is transparent. The safeguards are enforced. Nobody has called it a suicide forum. Nobody has linked it to 164 deaths.

The difference between Oregon and the forum is not ideology. It is architecture. One was built to protect the person making the decision. The other was built to remove every protection and call the absence freedom.

The people who built the forum know the difference. They chose the architecture they chose.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, these resources are real and available now:

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (US and Canada), available 24/7
• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
• The Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678
• Veterans Crisis Line: Call 988, then press 1, or text 838255
• Samaritans (UK): Call 116 123, free and available 24/7
• Molly Rose Foundation: mollyrosefoundation.org
• International Association for Suicide Prevention: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres

If you are supporting someone who is spending time on pro-suicide forums, the evidence suggests that direct confrontation is less effective than offering genuine community, professional mental health support, and concrete alternatives to isolation. The forum’s power is the void it fills. The counter is filling the void with something that does not kill.