Mind the gap: Exploring differences in suicide literacy between cybersuicide and offline suicide

The highly public nature of cybersuicide contradicts long-held beliefs of offline suicide, which may cause differences in the way people perceive and respond to both of them. However, knowledge of whether and how suicide literacy differs between cybersuicide and offline suicide is limited.

By analyzing social media data, this paper focused on livestreamed suicide and aimed to compare suicide literacy between cybersuicide and offline suicide on three aspects, including false knowledge structure, extent of association with stigma, and linguistic expression pattern. 7,236 Sina Weibo posts with relevant keywords were downloaded and analyzed. First, a content analysis was performed by human coders to determine whether each post reflected suicide-related false knowledge and stigma. Second, a text analysis was conducted using the Simplified Chinese version of LIWC software to automatically extract psycholinguistic features from each post. Third, based on selected features, classification models were developed using machine learning techniques to differentiate false knowledge of cybersuicide from that of offline suicide.

Results showed that, first, cybersuicide-related posts generally reflected more false knowledge than offline suicide-related posts ( $$ 255.13, p < 0.001). Significant differences were also observed in seven false knowledge types. Second, among posts reflecting false knowledge, cybersuicide-related posts generally carried more stigma than offline suicide-related posts ( $$ = 116.77, p < 0.001). Significant differences were also observed in three false knowledge types. Third, among established classification models, the highest F1 value reached 0.70.

The findings provide evidence of differences in suicide literacy between cybersuicide and offline suicide, and indicate the need for public awareness campaigns that specifically target cybersuicide.