What Do You Meme? -- Identifying Characteristics and User Perceptions of Suicide Memes in Social Media

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.