Viral internet challenges scale in preadolescents: An exploratory study

Social Media and Selfie-Related Mortality Amid COVID-19: Interrupted Time Series Analysis

BACKGROUND

COVID-19 had a considerable impact on mortality, but its effect on behaviors associated with social media remains unclear. As travel decreased due to lockdowns during the pandemic, selfie-related mortality may have decreased, as fewer individuals were taking smartphone photographs in risky locations.

OBJECTIVE

In this study, we examined the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on trends in selfie-related mortality.

METHODS

We identified fatal selfie-related injuries reported in web-based news reports worldwide between March 2014 and April 2021, including the deaths of individuals attempting a selfie photograph or anyone else present during the incident. The main outcome measure was the total number of selfie-related deaths per month. We used interrupted time series regression to estimate the monthly change in the number of selfie-related deaths over time, comparing the period before the pandemic (March 2014 to February 2020) with the period during the pandemic (March 2020 to April 2021).

RESULTS

The study included a total of 332 selfie-related deaths occurring between March 2014 and April 2021, with 18 (5.4%) deaths during the pandemic. Most selfie-related deaths occurred in India (n=153, 46.1%) and involved men (n=221, 66.6%) and young individuals (n=296, 89.2%). During the pandemic, two-thirds of selfie-related deaths were due to falls, whereas a greater proportion of selfie-related deaths before the pandemic were due to drowning. Based on interrupted time series regression, there was an average of 1.3 selfie-related deaths per month during the pandemic, compared with 4.3 deaths per month before the pandemic. The number of selfie-related deaths decreased by 2.6 in the first month of the pandemic alone and continued to decrease thereafter.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a marked decrease in selfie-related mortality, suggesting that lockdowns and travel restrictions likely prevented hazardous selfie-taking. The decrease in selfie-related mortality occurred despite a potential increase in social media use during the pandemic.

Extracting time patterns from the lifespans of TikTok challenges to characterize non-dangerous and dangerous ones

One of the key aspects that distinguish TikTok from other social media is the presence of challenges. A challenge is a kind of competition that starts when a user posts a video with certain actions and a certain hashtag and invites other users to replicate the same video in their own way. Most challenges are fun and harmless, but sometimes dangerous challenges are launched as well. The authors of these challenges use various tricks to bypass TikTok’s controls. In this paper, we analyze the lifespans of some TikTok challenges and show how they are very different for non-dangerous and dangerous ones. Then, we deepen our analysis by identifying some time patterns that characterize the two types of challenges. Finally, we test the accuracy of the results obtained on a large set of challenges different from those used during the detection of time patterns. The focus of this paper is the detection of time patterns allowing the classification of challenges in dangerous and non-dangerous ones. This could represent a first step towards an approach for the early detection of dangerous challenges in TikTok.