Increase In Use Of Social Media Research Articles

Long Overdue: Decriminalisation of Attempted Suicide in Nigeria

Suicide has become more notorious in recent years, and is now reported regularly in the news. There is greater awareness of the challenge of suicide and attempted suicide partly as a result of increase in social media use. Attempting suicide is a criminal offence under Nigeria’s criminal laws. This law is currently enforced in several states in Nigeria. A legacy of old law from the era of British colonization, several other African countries have provisions in their criminal legislation criminalizing suicide attempts. This paper argues that this provision is retrogressive and unhelpful. It provides an overview of suicide in Nigeria, the factors that have been identified as leading to suicide and suicidal ideation and the state of the criminal law on attempted suicide in Nigeria, including the recent reforms in Lagos State. It argues that in light of current realities, better understandings of mental health, and the public health importance of preventing suicides, the provisions criminalizing attempted suicide in Nigeria should, as a matter of urgency, be repealed. It makes several recommendations relating to developing a national suicide prevention strategy and more robust approaches to addressing mental health from a legal perspective.

The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents: A systematized review of literature.

Social media use by minors has significantly increased and has been linked to depression and suicidality. Simultaneously, age-adjusted suicide rates have steadily increased over the past decade in the United States with suicide being the second most common cause of death in youth. Hence, the increase in suicide rate parallels the simultaneous increase in social media use. In addition, the rate of nonsuicidal self-injury ranges between 14% and 21% among young people. Evidence suggests that self-harming youth is more active on online social networks than youth who do not engage in self-harm behavior. The role of online social networking on deliberates self-harm and suicidality in adolescents with a focus on negative influence was assessed by conducting a systematized literature review. A literature search on “PubMed” and “Ovid Medline” using a combination of MeSH terms yielded nine articles for data extraction satisfying predefined inclusion/exclusion criteria. It was found that social networking websites are utilized by suicidal and self-harming youth as a medium to communicate with and to seek social support from other users. Online social networking also leads to increased exposure to and engagement in self-harm behavior due to users receiving negative messages promoting self-harm, emulating self-injurious behavior of others, and adopting self-harm practices from shared videos. Greater time spent on social networking websites led to higher psychological distress, an unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and increased suicidal ideation. In conclusion, greater time spent on online social networking promotes self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation in vulnerable adolescents.

P113 HIV in social media: What do YouTube users watch?: Abstract P113 Table 1

<h3>Background/introduction</h3> Increased risk-taking behaviour, sexual networks, and sexually transmitted infections have been attributed to the rapid increase in social media use. YouTube is a video sharing, revenue generating website that’s content is not scientifically vetted, and any registered user can post media content. <h3>Aim(s)/objectives</h3> The objective of this study was to determine how HIV related issues are portrayed on YouTube. <h3>Methods</h3> A YouTube account was created using ‘worldwide’ and ‘English UK’ settings. The search engine was cleared, Flash Player cache emptied, and cookies removed. Each of the following search terms was used: ‘HIV’, ‘AIDS’, ‘PrEP’ and ‘HIV home testing’. Inclusion criteria: first 60 videos. Exclusion criteria: &gt;10 minute duration, exclusively non-HIV content, not in English. Each video was scored by 2 investigators. <h3>Results</h3> <h3>Discussion/conclusion</h3> Social media is an accessible source of information to the general public and healthcare professionals. When four search terms were compared, “HIV” and “AIDS” were most popular. “HIV” generated the most viewer-engagement. Following Charlie Sheen’s HIV disclosure and publication of PrEP studies (November 2015), there was a massively increased use of “HIV” and “PrEP” search terms. 10% (15/149) of videos contained factual inaccuracies with 40% (6/15) potentially causing significant harm. Due to high rate of embedded advertisements, inaccurate material, and material which could stigmatise PLWHA, it is vital that Public Health/HIV clinicians harness the potential of social media, are aware of the associated risks and strive to promote accurate information to patients.

A Novel Adaptive Conditional Probability-Based Predicting Model for User’s Personality Traits

With the pervasive increase in social media use, the explosion of users’ generated data provides a potentially very rich source of information, which plays an important role in helping online researchers understand user’s behaviors deeply. Since user’s personality traits are the driving force of user’s behaviors, hence, in this paper, along with social network features, we first extract linguistic features, emotional statistical features, and topic features from user’s Facebook status updates, followed by quantifying importance of features via Kendall correlation coefficient. And then, on the basis of weighted features and dynamic updated thresholds of personality traits, we deploy a novel adaptive conditional probability-based predicting model which considers prior knowledge of correlations between user’s personality traits to predict user’s Big Five personality traits. In the experimental work, we explore the existence of correlations between user’s personality traits which provides a better theoretical support for our proposed method. Moreover, on the same Facebook dataset, compared to other methods, our method can achieve anF1-measure of 80.6% when taking into account correlations between user’s personality traits, and there is an impressive improvement of 5.8% over other approaches.