Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Dec 12, 2022)
Date Submitted: Dec 12, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The #BlueWhaleChallenge and presence of suicidal ideations on Polish-language Twitter
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Blue Whale Challenge (BWCh) was a widely reported media hoax in 2017, presented as a online game that encouraged teenagers to commit suicide. The actual link between this internet phenomenon and the suicide remains doubtful.
Objective:
The aim of the study was to analyze the scale of BWCh interest and the suicidal content in polish Twitter and suicidal statistics.
Methods:
The Google Trends tool was used to estimate the timeframe of Internet users' interest. Media reports on BWCh were analyzed using Google News. Analysis of Twitter content containing the word "suicide" was carried out. Each tweet was reviewed to identify suicidally significant content. Data on suicides and suicide attempts were obtained from The National Police Headquarters.
Results:
Internet interest in BWCh was limited to March 2017. 240 clinically-significant tweets were identified, 65.7% of which contained thoughts of suicide, 11.7% as plans to commit suicide and 1.3% as encourage to suicide. There was a slight increase in suicidal behavior during April-May of 2017 in the 19-24 age group, compared to 2018-2019. However, the overall annual statistics for 2017 did not differ from the long-term trends.
Conclusions:
There is no clear link between the popularity of BWCh and the increased suicidal behavior on national level. At the same time, there was alarming suicidal content at Twitter. Therefore, it would be advisable to address the help and preventive measures for users of social media.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.