Social Media Users’ Reactions to Suicide

Abstract

To explore how social media users react to suicide, we collected and analyzed 3,482 public comments on Bangladeshi suicide news emphasizing the user’s gender, victim’s gender, victim’s profession, and suicide risk factor. The quantitative content analysis found that users react to suicide in nine different ways: angry, sadness, surprise, irony, ridicule, judgmental, justification, speculation, and miscellaneous. Of them, angry (20.3%) is the dominant reaction. In many cases, users mock the suicide victims (12.7%), showing less empathy. We found strong positive correlations between users’ reactions and victims’ profession (φ = 0.493; p < .05) and users’ reactions and suicide risk factors (φ = 0.233; p < .05).

Keywords:

• Suicide
• social media users
• comments
• online reactions
• Facebook

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman

Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman is a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. Currently, he is pursuing an MA (Digital Humanities) degree in the Department of Media and Technology Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. His current research focuses on social media, digital news and information, and online and information behavior in Bangladesh. He can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]

Mohammad Harun Or Rashid

Mohammad Harun Or Rashid is an Assistant Professor in Rajshahi University of Engineering and technology. His research interests span a wide spectrum, ranging from Sociolinguistic to Comparative Text Analysis. Currently, he is working on qualitative analysis of literary and non-literary texts. He can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]