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Paper Type
ERF
Description
Social Media can spread messages, emotions, and behaviors among large audiences. Particularly, the consequences of emotion propagation become alarming when negative and shocking events like celebrity suicides happen and influence many vulnerable users. Analyzing social media discussions enables us to understand the mechanisms by which negative emotions spread, and also design effective health interventions. Here we investigate the suicide events of four celebrities and the subsequent Twitter discussions that appeared in the form of cascades – chains of retweets. By using a state-of-the-art BERT-based language model to identify emotion scores, we find that sadness and fear are the leading emotions expressed in each event and that the speed, size, and lifetime of dialogues vary depending on their emotional composition. Further analysis aims to provide new theoretical explanations.
Paper Number
1837
Recommended Citation
Nouri, Ehsan; Saraf, Nilesh; Goh, Jie Mein; Dasgupta, Srabana; and Cyr, Dianne, "How negative emotions spread on social media: the case of celebrity suicides" (2023). AMCIS 2023 Proceedings. 17.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2023/social_comput/social_comput/17
How negative emotions spread on social media: the case of celebrity suicides
Social Media can spread messages, emotions, and behaviors among large audiences. Particularly, the consequences of emotion propagation become alarming when negative and shocking events like celebrity suicides happen and influence many vulnerable users. Analyzing social media discussions enables us to understand the mechanisms by which negative emotions spread, and also design effective health interventions. Here we investigate the suicide events of four celebrities and the subsequent Twitter discussions that appeared in the form of cascades – chains of retweets. By using a state-of-the-art BERT-based language model to identify emotion scores, we find that sadness and fear are the leading emotions expressed in each event and that the speed, size, and lifetime of dialogues vary depending on their emotional composition. Further analysis aims to provide new theoretical explanations.
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