Low Daniel M, Zuromski Kelly L, Kessler Daniel, Ghosh Satrajit S, Nock Matthew, Dempsey Walter
Harvard University & MIT.
Harvard University.
Proc Conf Empir Methods Nat Lang Process. 2021 Nov;2021:95-103. doi: 10.18653/v1/2021.cinlp-1.8.
Every day, individuals post suicide notes on social media asking for support, resources, and reasons to live. Some posts receive few comments while others receive many. While prior studies have analyzed whether specific responses are more or less helpful, it is not clear if the quantity of comments received is beneficial in reducing symptoms or in keeping the user engaged with the platform and hence with life. In the present study, we create a large dataset of users' first r/SuicideWatch (SW) posts from Reddit (N=21,274), collect the comments as well as the user's subsequent posts (N=1,615,699) to determine whether they post in SW again in the future. We use propensity score stratification, a causal inference method for observational data, and estimate whether the amount of comments -as a measure of social support- increases or decreases the likelihood of posting again on SW. One hypothesis is that receiving more comments may the likelihood of the user posting in SW in the future, either by reducing symptoms or because comments from untrained peers may be harmful. On the contrary, we find that receiving more comments the likelihood a user will post in SW again. We discuss how receiving more comments is helpful, not by permanently relieving symptoms since users make another SW post and their second posts have similar mentions of suicidal ideation, but rather by reinforcing users to seek support and remain engaged with the platform. Furthermore, since receiving only 1 comment -the most common case- decreases the likelihood of posting again by 14% on average depending on the time window, it is important to develop systems that encourage more commenting.
每天，都有人在社交媒体上发布自杀遗书，寻求支持、资源和活下去的理由。有些帖子收到的评论很少，而有些则收到很多。虽然先前的研究分析了特定的回复是否更有帮助，但尚不清楚收到的评论数量是否有利于减轻症状，或者让用户继续使用该平台，从而继续活下去。在本研究中，我们创建了一个来自Reddit的用户首次在r/SuicideWatch（SW）上发布帖子的大型数据集（N = 21274），收集评论以及用户随后的帖子（N = 1615699），以确定他们未来是否会再次在SW上发布。我们使用倾向得分分层法，一种用于观察性数据的因果推断方法，来估计评论数量（作为社会支持的一种衡量）是增加还是减少了再次在SW上发布的可能性。一种假设是，收到更多评论可能会增加用户未来在SW上发布的可能性，要么是通过减轻症状，要么是因为未经训练的同龄人给出的评论可能有害。相反，我们发现收到更多评论会增加用户再次在SW上发布的可能性。我们讨论了收到更多评论是如何有帮助的，不是通过永久缓解症状，因为用户会再次发布SW帖子，而且他们的第二篇帖子也有类似的自杀念头提及，而是通过强化用户寻求支持并继续使用该平台。此外，由于只收到1条评论（最常见的情况）平均会使再次发布的可能性根据时间窗口降低14%，因此开发鼓励更多评论的系统很重要。
