JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Research suggests that direct exposure to suicidal behavior and acts of self-harm through social media may increase suicidality through imitation and modeling particularly to more vulnerable populations. One example of a social media phenomenon that demonstrates how self-harming behavior could potentially be propagated is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC).

Objective:

We investigate the way individuals portray the BWC on social media, with an emphasis on factors that could pose a risk to vulnerable populations.

Methods:

We first used a thematic analysis approach coding 60 publicly posted YouTube videos, 1,112 comments on those videos, and 150 Twitter posts that explicitly referenced BWC. We then deductively coded the YouTube videos based on the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) Safe Messaging guidelines as a metric for the contagion risk associated with each video.

Results:

The thematic analysis revealed that social media users post about BWC to raise awareness and discourage participating, express sorrow for the participants, criticize the participants, or describe a relevant experience. The deductive coding of the YouTube videos showed that most of the videos violate at least 50% of the SPRC safe and effective messaging guidelines.

Conclusions:

These posts might have the problematic effect of normalizing the BWC through repeated exposure, modeling, and reinforcement of self-harming and suicidal behavior, especially among vulnerable populations such as adolescents. More efforts are needed to educate social media users and content generators on safe messaging guidelines and factors that encourage versus discourage contagion effects.