What Do You Meme? -- Identifying Characteristics and User Perceptions of Suicide Memes in Social Media
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Suicide memes have recently attracted increasing attention from the public. The visual stimulus and the humorous nature of memes, which seem contradictory to serious suicide-related topics, lead to a lack of understanding of how this new expression differs from general serious suicide notes. Focusing on the r/SuicideMeme Reddit community, we present a computational quantitative study to better understand suicide memes. Our findings revealed users’ visual preferences for suicide memes: fewer and smaller faces, less colorful, sharper and higher contrast images, along with sadder, more fearful, angrier, and higher-arousal overlaying text. We found that these features impact user interactions to different degrees, with --- for example --- the existence of faces associated with a 10.6% decrease in the expected number of comments. Using topic modeling, we also discovered that user perceptions of suicide memes in r/SuicideMeme were mostly favourable. Further, we developed prediction models to identify suicide memes that achieved an accuracy of 80.04% and an F1 score of 80.75%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computational quantitative empirical study on suicide memes on social media. We believe our study provides a deeper understanding of the characteristics and motivations behind suicide memes, and insights for designing more effective moderation strategies for such content. Content Warning: This paper discusses the sensitive topic of suicide and contains suicide-related content.
Authors: Liuliu Chen, Jo Robinson, Mike Conway
Institution: The University of Melbourne
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health via Writing
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411120715