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

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..