Troubling content: Guiding discussion of death by suicide on social media.

Justin Chun‐ting Ho,Nikki Dunne,Nichole Fernández,Julie Brownlie,Tim Squirrell

doi:10.1111/1467-9566.13245

Justin Chun‐ting Ho, Nikki Dunne + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13245

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Abstract

Growing concerns about "online harm" and "duty of care" fuel debate about how best to regulate and moderate "troubling content" on social media. This has become a pressing issue in relation to the potential application of media guidelines to online discussion of death by suicide-discussion which is troubling because it is often transgressive and contested. Drawing on an innovative mixed-method analysis of a large-scale Twitter dataset, this article explores in depth, for the first time, the complexities of applying existing media guidelines on reporting death by suicide to online contexts. By focusing on five highly publicised deaths, it illustrates the limits of this translation but also the significance of empathy (its presence and absence) in online accounts of these deaths. The multi-relational and politicised nature of empathy, and the polarised nature of Twitter debate, suggests that we need to step back from calls for the automatic application of guidelines produced in a pre-digital time to understand more about the sociocultural context of how suicide is discussed on social media. This stepping back matters because social media is now a key part of how lives and deaths are deemed grievable and deserving of our attention.

Highlights

Violation of guidelines on reporting of suicide all over this app
The multi-relational and politicised nature of empathy, and the polarised nature of Twitter debate, suggests that we need to step back from calls for the automatic application of guidelines produced in a pre-d igital time to understand more about the sociocultural context of how suicide is discussed on social media
We aim to explore the challenges of operationalising guidelines through an empirical investigation of Twitter data, presenting evidence about the extent to which existing guidelines on reporting of deaths by suicide are being breached “all over this app” and considering how they might be extended to social media

Summary

Introduction

In 2019, the government published a White Paper (Javid & Wright, 2019), announcing its intention to establish a statutory duty of care by social media companies, to be overseen by an independent regulator. The disputed nature of harmful online content, meant that the White Paper was inevitably dealing with “grey areas”, not least because harm often results not “from deliberate criminality, but from ordinary people released from the constraints of civility” (Guardian, 2019). The White Paper is part of a wider debate on digital citizenship and ethical behaviour (McCosker, 2014) including whether “aberrant” online participation is best understood as trolling, provocation or as some other form of public engagement (Phillips, 2011; Jane, 2017)

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