The influence of social media on concerning behaviors is not limited to children and teenagers alone. This case shows that social media sites are becoming venues to share personal opinions and to express oneself-even painful thoughts -but at the same time, are making it easier for cyber-bullies to target their victims. His suicide was attributed to excessive hostile comments. He appeared to be strong as he shared videos about the “It Gets Better” project, which aimed to address prevention of teen suicide.
Although the school counselors had advised him not to use social media to talk about his sexuality, he voiced his thoughts through his YouTube posts. Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old YouTuber who actively expressed himself through videos on matters of his sexuality homophobia and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, ended his life on 18 September 2011. This prompted the discussion on the need for an advanced platform policy to prevent such incidents from happening again.įurthermore, there have been several incidents of self-expressive YouTubers ending their own lives. The posts that she “liked” were identified to be images that glorified suicide.
In 2017, Molly Russel, who was known to have been posting and searching for keywords related to suicide and self-harm, such as “cutting,” “biting,” and “burning,” ended her own life. This became an urgent issue following the death of a British girl, Molly Russel, whose father, Ian Russel, stated in an interview with BBC that Instagram encouraged his daughter to commit suicide. There have been longstanding concerns over how social networking services manage content that may negatively affect the psychological well-being of its audience, especially the young users. The role of the Internet, particularly social networking services (SNSs), on suicide-related thoughts and behaviors has been a topic of growing interest and debate. Suicide can occur at any time in life and is the second leading cause of death among individuals aged 15–29 years. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and we provide our codebook.įunding: This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A3A2099973) and the MSIT(Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology Research Center) support program(IITP-749) supervised by the IITP(Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation).Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īccording to the latest data on suicide by the World Health Organization, nearly 800,000 people die every year due to suicide, meaning one person dies every 90 seconds. Received: DecemAccepted: Published: June 10, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Jung, Kim.
PLoS ONE 16(6):Įditor: Vincenzo De Luca, University of Toronto, CANADA YouTube has the potential to function as a locus for open discussion, education, collective coping, and even the diagnosis of suicidal ideation.Ĭitation: Jung EJ, Kim S (2021) Suicide on YouTube:Factors engaging viewers to a selection of suicide-themed videos. These findings have implications for not only platform service providers but also diverse groups of individuals who participate in online discussions on suicide. The results of the hierarchical multiple regression showed that the characteristics of content provider and content expression were more significant predictors of viewer engagement than were the characteristics of the message. This study employed content analysis method to identify the factors predicting viewer responses to suicide-themed content from the perspectives of who’s, what’s, and how’s of suicide-themed videos. This study focused on one of the health concerns worldwide, a leading cause of death related to mental health-suicide-in the context of a dominant visual social media platform, YouTube. Visual social media platforms can function as both facilitators and intervenors of concerning behaviors.
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