Unit Suicide Research & Mental Health Promotion, Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Center for Public Health, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. Electronic address: thomas.niederkrotenthaler@meduniwien.ac.at.
Media recommendations for suicide reporting are recommended to prevent imitative suicide but little is known about social media reactions to different revelations about celebrity suicide.
Using the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API), we recorded public tweets mentioning Avicii from the day when his death was reported (N?=?2,865,292). We compared that data with a dataset of random tweets. Furthermore, we recorded tweets including suicide in 124 languages before Avicii's death (N?=?5,939,107). We processed English tweets mentioning Avicii with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to quantify the frequency of affects and related linguistic signals. We also processed the text of tweets to detect tweets mentioning the suicide method, and we retrieved the list of followers of users who tweeted about the method. We constructed reply networks from the dataset, analysing three networks corresponding to the major news events about Avicii's death.
Avicii's suicide sparked immediate strong interest with both positive (?²?=?781.06, p?