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Social media and selfie mortality amid COVID-19: An interrupted time series analysis
Sarit Kang-Auger;
Antoine Lewin;
Aimina Ayoub;
Marianne Bilodeau-Bertrand;
Sophie Marcoux;
Nathalie Auger
ABSTRACT
Background:
COVID-19 had a considerable impact on mental health disorders, but the effect on mental behaviors linked with social media is not understood.
Objective:
We determined the effect of the pandemic on selfie mortality due to selfitis.
Methods:
We identified fatal selfie injuries reported worldwide in online news reports between March 2014 and April 2021. The main outcome measure was the total number of selfie deaths per month. We used interrupted time series regression to estimate the change in the number of selfie deaths every month over time, comparing the period before versus during the pandemic.
Results:
The study included 332 selfie deaths. There was an average of 1.3 selfie deaths per month during the pandemic compared with 4.3 deaths per month before the pandemic. The number of selfie deaths decreased by 2.6 in the first month of the pandemic alone and continued to decrease thereafter.
Conclusions:
Our findings indicate that COVID-19 led to a marked decrease in selfie mortality, suggesting that selfie-taking in hazardous circumstances may have been replaced by other selfitis-related behaviors in social media.
Citation
Please cite as:
Kang-Auger S, Lewin A, Ayoub A, Bilodeau-Bertrand M, Marcoux S, Auger N
Social Media and Selfie-Related Mortality Amid COVID-19: Interrupted Time Series Analysis