In July, 27-year-old travel influencer Aanvi Kamdar fell to her death while shooting footage at a 300-foot waterfall in India to share on her Instagram.
In April, a 39-year-old content creator slipped off a viewing platform in the country of Georgia while climbing a barrier to take a selfie.
In March, it was a 43-year-old tourist in Indonesia; he had just taken a photo of himself at the edge of a cliff. In December, a 39-year-old tourist fell off a cliff in Beacon Hill, New York, while posing for a selfie with her husband.
According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, there were 379 selfie-related deaths worldwide between 2008 and 2021. That’s more than 4 times the number of people who died by shark bite in the same period. And still that figure is likely an underestimate, because the numbers are pulled mostly from media reports, which don’t cover all deaths and can be hard for researchers to find.
Selfie-related fatalities are not one or two risk-takers, airheads, or vain teenagers. They affect tourists and locals of all ages and genders across the world. That’s why, for the past few years, researcher Sam Cornell has led the call to consider death by selfie a public health issue.
“This is a human behavior that could be detrimental, and so therefore we need to educate and communicate better,” Cornell tells me. He’s getting his Ph.D. on these types of deaths—with an even narrower focus on fatal falls in aquatic locations—at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.
Before the ubiquity of the front-facing camera, which made it to iPhones in 2010, people still died by accidental fall in natural destinations. “People have always taken risks,” Cornell says. “Social media and smartphones—they just accelerate and amplify.”
It’s not just that smartphones can be distracting in risky situations. They’re also actively increasing the number of people going to spots like cliffs and waterfalls. A study in April quantified, for the first time, how social media exposure has directly increased the number of visitors to national parks in the U.S. More visitors mean more opportunities for things to go wrong.
Selfie deaths are quite rare, with a peak of 68 in 2019. But they seem as if they’re here to stay. The 2022 Journal of Travel Medicine study found that falls from heights accounted for about 50 percent of selfie-related injuries, followed by transport-related incidents (28 percent) and drownings (13 percent). Tourists—37 percent of victims—were most likely to die by falling from heights than by other causes, and they tended to be older than local victims, who were more often teenagers and young adults engaging in risky behavior. The highest number of deaths occur in India (a statistic that prompted the country to declare selfie-related fatalities a national problem back in 2015), followed by the U.S. and Russia.
Yet, despite the clear trends, the public and media seem to treat selfie falls not as the result of safety issues at tourism sites that need to be addressed but rather as individual failings. Cornell scoured media coverage of fatalities and found that it rarely included any sort of prevention education. Instead, articles tended to adopt a blaming tone, recounting what the individual had done leading up to the fatality or highlighting the apathy and ignorance of tourists (though some recent pieces do, in fact, mention the framing of selfies as a public health issue). The comment sections were usually pretty ruthless too, Cornell notes.
Consider two on the Daily Mail article covering Kamdar’s death at that 300-foot-tall waterfall. “That’s what happens when you’re focused on your phone and not your surroundings, very hard to have any sympathy,” wrote one reader. Another said: “I think this says something about the intelligence of people who call themselves influencers.”
Land managers at natural tourist sites, however, do take these incidents seriously, and they consider it a problem for which they (and not just the individual) hold the responsibility to address. In another study, Cornell talked with 18 land managers in Australia, including national parks personnel and local councils in Sydney, where beautiful but dangerous cliffs attract crowds. He found that as visitor numbers increase, “they’re struggling with this problem,” he says, and looking for new ways to solve it.
The typical solution, from a land management perspective, is to put up educational signs and barriers, as is already done in spots that can be dangerous even if you’re not glued to your phone. A more drastic measure is to designate an entire area a “no-selfie zone.” Some researchers have called for more adoption of these zones; there’s no data currently to support their efficacy. But presumably signs, barriers, and restrictions can only do so much for people determined to get the perfect shot, given the pressure of getting Instagram likes or re-creating the experience of the travel influencer who inspired their visit.
Perhaps that would be an ideal intervention: if the travel influencers themselves warned would-be visitors of the possible misjudgments when capturing content in risky destinations. But when Cornell spoke to 19 travel and tourism influencers for a not-yet-published study, he found little buy-in. “One of the main themes that came out was, like, ‘We’re content creators,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘We’re not here to educate. We’re here to entertain.’ ” And regardless of what influencers should do, it’s hard to regulate or enforce what they say to their captive audiences. (Although there is some precedent: A few years ago, an Australian agency threatened financial influencers with jail time if they gave misleading information.)
If smartphones are the problem, maybe they’re also the solution. In Cornell’s dream world, a manufacturer like Apple would alert its users upon reaching certain coordinates that they’re in a dangerous zone. After all, “you’re already on your phone,” he muses. Such alerts could even let you know how many people have previously died in that same spot while taking a selfie—a sobering strategy that has been used to discourage the dangerous sport of rock fishing in Australia. Indian researchers created a version of this idea back in 2018: an app called Saftie (like, safety plus selfie), which appears to no longer be available. One obvious issue with an app is that it needs to be downloaded, so it’s likely not reaching the more at-risk populations who aren’t already considering the issue of selfie fatalities.
While researchers study the best ways to reach selfie takers, all strategies boil down to education and awareness so that individuals can make the safest choices. “I think you should be able to take a selfie wherever you want,” Cornell says. “But I also think that you should be informed if you’re doing something risky.”
The next time you hear about a selfie death, consider your own risk and communicate with those in your life who might be at increased risk. After all, those who die are the misfortunate among many, many more people who take selfies in the same places, and live to share the pictures.
