Growing concerns about “online harm” and “duty of care” fuel debate about how best to regulate and moderate “troubling content” on social media. This has become a pressing issue in relation to the potential application of media guidelines to online discussion of death by suicide—discussion which is troubling because it is often transgressive and contested. Drawing on an innovative mixed-method analysis of a large-scale Twitter dataset, this article explores in depth, for the first time, the complexities of applying existing media guidelines on reporting death by suicide to online contexts. By focusing on five highly publicised deaths, it illustrates the limits of this translation but also the significance of empathy (its presence and absence) in online accounts of these deaths. The multi-relational and politicised nature of empathy, and the polarised nature of Twitter debate, suggests that we need to step back from calls for the automatic application of guidelines produced in a pre-digital time to understand more about the sociocultural context of how suicide is discussed on social media. This stepping back matters because social media is now a key part of how lives and deaths are deemed grievable and deserving of our attention.

中文翻译：

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令人不安的内容：在社交媒体上指导有关自杀死亡的讨论

对“在线伤害”和“注意义务”的担忧日益加剧，引发了关于如何最好地监管和缓和社交媒体上“令人不安的内容”的争论。这已成为一个紧迫的问题，因为它可能将媒体指导方针应用于在线讨论自杀死亡——这种讨论令人不安，因为它经常是越界的和有争议的。本文利用对大规模 Twitter 数据集的创新混合方法分析，首次深入探讨了将现有媒体关于报告自杀死亡的指南应用于在线环境的复杂性。通过关注五起广为人知的死亡事件，它说明了这种翻译的局限性，但也说明了对这些死亡的在线描述中的同理心（它的存在和缺失）的重要性。同理心的多重关系和政治化性质，以及 Twitter 辩论的两极分化性质，表明我们需要从要求自动应用数字前时代产生的指导方针的呼吁中退一步，以更多地了解社交媒体上如何讨论自杀的社会文化背景。退一步很重要，因为社交媒体现在是人们认为生死值得悲痛和值得我们关注的关键部分。