Jun. 30, 2018
SY Lee and Y Kwon
1. Objectives
The study aimed to examine how Twitter is utilized as a platform where individuals seek others to form suicide pacts.
2. Methods
1) They collected all Korean tweets containing the term 'suicide pact' between October 16, 2017 and November 30, 2017 using Twitter's application programming interfaces (APIs).
2) A Python program was used to initially identify tweets that aimed to find others for a suicide pact. Human coders then manually analyzed the content of these tweets.
3) The tweets were examined for specific details like the city of the user, their gender and age, preferred contact method, and desired gender of the potential suicide pact partner.
4) Poisson regression analysis was conducted to investigate the characteristics of tweets that attracted more replies or interactions from other users.
3. Key Findings
1) During the 43-day data collection period, 1,702 tweets by 551 users sought others for suicide pacts.
2) Many of these tweets contained detailed personal information as mentioned above.
3) The number of replies a tweet received varied based on the types of information included in the tweet content.
4. Conclusions
1) The results indicate that Twitter might serve as an attractive platform for individuals to connect with others for the purpose of forming suicide pacts.
2) The researchers suggested that government authorities should implement measures to prevent suicides resulting from suicide pacts formed via Twitter.
5. Review
1) Besides the intuitive term 'suicide pact,' there might be metaphorical expressions used in posts seeking suicide partners. Using LLM to list these words and finding more tweets seeking suicide partners could enhance data analysis.
2) The paper collected data for about a month, but gathering data over a longer period would be beneficial.
