Department of Psychiatry, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Crisis. 2023 Jul;44(4):292-299. doi: 10.1027/0227-5910/a000865. Epub 2022 Jun 3.
The content of suicide-specific social media posts may impact suicide rates, and putatively harmful and/or protective content may vary by the author's influence. This study sought to characterize how suicide-related Twitter content differs according to user influence. Suicide-related tweets from July 1, 2015, to June 1, 2016, geolocated to Toronto, Canada, were collected and randomly selected for coding (n = 2,250) across low, medium, or high user influence levels (based on the number of followers, tweets, retweets, and posting frequency). Logistic regression was used to identify differences by user influence for various content variables. Low- and medium-influence users typically tweeted about personal experiences with suicide and associations with mental health and shared morbid humor/flippant tweets. High-influence users tended to tweet about suicide clusters, suicide in youth, older adults, indigenous people, suicide attempts, and specific methods. Tweets across influence levels predominantly focused on suicide deaths, and few described suicidal ideation or included helpful content. Social media data were from a single location and epoch. This study demonstrated more problematic content vis-à-vis safe suicide messaging in tweets by high-influence users and a paucity of protective content across all users. These results highlight the need for further research and potential intervention.
社交媒体上与自杀相关的内容可能会影响自杀率，而具有潜在危害和/或保护作用的内容可能因作者的影响力而异。本研究旨在描述根据用户影响力的不同，与自杀相关的 Twitter 内容有何差异。从 2015 年 7 月 1 日至 2016 年 6 月 1 日，收集了在加拿大多伦多有地理位置标记的与自杀相关的推文，并随机选择了低、中、高用户影响力水平（基于关注者数量、推文数量、转发数量和发帖频率）的推文进行编码（n = 2250）。使用逻辑回归来识别不同用户影响力对各种内容变量的差异。低影响力和中影响力用户通常会在推文中分享个人自杀经历以及与心理健康的关联，并分享病态幽默/轻率的推文。高影响力用户则倾向于发布关于自杀群集、青少年自杀、老年人自杀、原住民自杀、自杀企图和特定自杀方法的推文。在不同影响力水平的推文中，大多集中于自杀死亡，很少描述自杀意念或包含有用内容。社交媒体数据仅来自于一个特定的地点和时期。本研究表明，与自杀相关的高影响力用户的推文中存在更多的问题内容，而所有用户的推文中都缺乏保护内容。这些结果强调了进一步研究和潜在干预的必要性。
