Abstract

This paper examines peer-reviewed publications studying the links between social media and youth suicide. For this systematic review, papers were collected from three academic databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. From 495 papers reviewed, 82 were included in the initial review. In addition, a second search of the ScienceDirect database yielded 15 studies. From these 97 papers, the findings indicate that there are two major links between social media and youth suicide: (1) the positive link, which is mainly about youth suicide prevention including detecting youth at risk of suicide with their social media posts, running youth suicide prevention awareness campaigns, and offering consultations to youth with suicide ideation via social media; and (2) the negative link, which focuses on how social media is used as a tool to encourage and pressure youth towards suicide including cyberbullying, sexting, and disseminating information about self-harm techniques or prosuicide content on social media. This research demonstrates that social media has both positive and negative links to youth suicide. We make suggestions for future information systems research.

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