JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The new reality of cybersuicide raises challenges to ideologies about offline suicide, which may lead to changes in audience attitudes. However, knowledge on whether stigmatizing attitudes differ across online and offline suicides still remains limited.

Objective:

This study considered livestreamed suicide as a typical representative of cybersuicide, and used social media data (Sina Weibo) to investigate the differences in stigmatizing attitudes across online and offline suicides, in terms of attitude types and linguistic characteristics, respectively.

Methods:

4,393 online suicide-related and 2,843 offline suicide-related social media posts were collected and analyzed. First, human coders were recruited and trained to perform a content analysis on collected posts to determine whether each of them reflected stigma or not. Second, a text analysis tool was used to automatically extract a number of psycholinguistic features from each post. After that, based on selected features, a series of classification models were constructed for different purposes: (i) differentiating the general stigma of online suicide from that of offline suicide; (ii) differentiating the negative stereotypes of online suicide from that of offline suicide.

Results:

In terms of attitude types, online suicide was observed to carry more stigma than offline suicide (online suicide: 35.42%; offline suicide: 20.68%; χ21=179.80, P<.001). Furthermore, between online and offline suicides, there existed significant differences in the proportion of posts associated with five different negative stereotypes, respectively, including “stupid and shallow” (χ21=28.89, P<.001), “false representation” (χ21=144.39, P<.001), “weak and pathetic” (χ21=20.44, P<.001), “glorified and normalized” (χ21=177.64, P<.001), and “immoral” (χ21=11.75, P=.001). Significant gender differences existed. In terms of linguistic characteristics, F-measure values of classification models ranged from .81 to .85.

Conclusions:

The way people perceive online suicide is different from the way people perceive offline suicide. Results of this study provide implications for the reduction of stigma against suicide.