Online Community and Suicide Prevention: Investigating the Linguistic Cues and Reply Bias

With the rise of Internet technology over the past decade, a new approach to suicide prevention shifts focus to online communities. However, due to the various and dynamic ecosystems of an online community, its effects on suicide prevention remain largely unknown. To investigate this issue, we use linguistic analysis and selected SuicideWatch, a forum on reddit as our research context and investigated whether an online crowd may have reply bias to users who post about suicide. Our findings indicate an important phenomenon that users’ replies could be biased by linguistic cues given in the title of posts. The findings and approach proposed in this study offer insights for developing innovative online approaches to suicide prevention. Author