Girlbosses, The Red Pill, and the Anomie and Fatale of Gender Online: Analyzing Posts from r/ S uicide W atch on R eddit (2023)

Abstract: The proliferation of social media use in daily life has introduced a new practice in today’s society: posting about suicidal ideation or intent online. Recent trends in social media reflect a movement towards different forms of male and female empowerment that impact gender norms, and thus, may impact social categorization. This pilot study explores posts from r/SuicideWatch that include discussions of gender and its implications for online conceptions of social identity. We use computational methods borrowed from natural language processing to analyze this impact from a novel perspective rarely seen in sociology.

## introduction there is an estimated population of 4.8 billion social media users as of 2022 @xcite . several studies have identified the role of social media in the construction of group identity, from college sports @xcite to political identity @xcite . further, social comparison through social media has been researched in relation to the impact on identity and self-esteem @xcite . expressing suicidal intent on social media occurs often enough to be explored as a public health issue @xcite , and there are several different communities online dedicated to providing peer support and a place to share for those suffering from suicidal ideation. this pilot study utilizes the findings of emile durkheim's suicide: a study in sociology @xcite to explore present-day motivations for suicide through the analysis of posts by users of reddit concerning their own suicidality. the emergence of new models online for the "empowered" woman or man, paired with the social disruption during the covid-19 pandemic, necessitates an inquiry into how changing gender * ma candidate at the graduate school of asia-pacific studies norms may or may not be distressing for individuals. this study is based on a bertopic model of text posts from r/suicidewatch, a subreddit for peer-support for suicidal ideation. this paper will discuss the topics identified in the model that coincide with durkheim's theory, especially as they relate to recent narratives on social media surrounding empowerment and gender. ## research questions and hypotheses this leads us to the presentation of the research questions for this study, which can be understood as follows: for men and women posting in r/suicidewatch, being overly confined by the expectations, or moral regulation, of their social category would lead to fatalistic suicidality; while being confused by moral regulations would lead to anomic suicidality. these questions then lead to three hypotheses to test in this paper: i. if online empowerment movements can impact the morality of a social category, then we can expect to see topics related to each one in posts made by men and women in r/suicidewatch. ii. if gender expectations online create an anomic environment, the we can expect to see topics related to overwhelming confusion or feeling lost. iii. if gender expectations online create a fatalistic environment, the we can expect to see topics related to feeling trapped or controlled. ## methodology the data for this study is from a publicly available dataset on kaggle. utilizing the pushshift api to scrape posts from r/depression and r/suicidewatch for suicide and depression detection, this dataset contains 484,969 posts from r/suicidewatch between 2008 and 2021. 7 to inquire more into the potential influence of online empowerment movements on gender and suicidality, we focused on posts in the kaggle dataset posted after january 1st, 2016 up until 2021, as google trends reports that searches for "girlboss" peaked in march of 2016, while searches for "alphamale" has remained steady. 8 because the gender identity of the posters is not specified in this particular dataset, we then isolated the posts that contained age and gender identifiers, typically denoted on the website as some variation of "30f" or "18m." this was done using regular expressions (regex) to match patterns of only two digits followed by a capital or lowercase "f" or "m" within the body of the texts. this led to the creation of a new dataset of 1381 posts containing female identifiers, another dataset of 4190 posts containing male identifiers, and a dataset of 301 posts containing both. the two datasets with either a female identifier or a male identifier were then used to create two bertopic models. bertopic is a technique for topic modeling, utilizing c-tf-idf for clustering and embedding models to form topics and facilitate easier interpretation while preserving important terms in the description for each topic (grootendorst, 2022). sentence transformers were then used to compute sentence embeddings within the text in order to compute semantic relationships between sentences in the text and further refine the models @xcite . we then utilized maximal marginal relevance (mmr) as the representation model to calculate mmr between candidate terms and the document itself. this approach considers the similarity of key terms between others and in the context of the entire document, resulting in better diversity within the extracted topics and their terms @xcite . the final bertopic model for the posts containing female identifiers yielded 278 topics, while the bertopic model for the posts with male identifiers yielded 646 topics. the appendix contains 200 of the most salient topics with their count, name, and representation for each subset of the data. college and school performance are both included in topics from each dataset, the representation of this topic was 949 out of 1381 posts for women (topic 1), while it was 528 out of 4190 for men (topic 4). failure and success are also represented in women (topic 41), and men (topic 42). money is also discussed for women (topic 27, 154), and for men (topic 2). the presence of these topics in posts from r/suicidewatch with female identifiers suggests the influence of the "girlboss" movement, but cannot be conclusive. it is important to note in-terpersonal events do appear in the women dataset, with references to infidelity (topic 140) and family and relationship troubles (topic 64, 80, 97, 124). however, topics concerning school and work, while may not conclusively suggest the influence of the girlboss empowerment movement, does suggest that achievement can be a notable trigger for suicide in women, contrary to previous research. less ambiguous is the influence of "manosphere" or "alphamale" ideas present in the topics for posts from r/suicidewatch containing male identifiers. there are topics concerning being unattractive (topic 44), facing rejection from women (topic 58), being a virgin (topic 157), and physical fitness (topic 159). as previously discussed, achievement-related topics were present in the dataset, but it is also important to note that interpersonal events did appear in topics discussing conflict with parents (topic 28) and breakups (topic 169), but with less frequency. for the women's dataset, topics related to confusion or feeling lost were more prevalent than in the men's dataset. this is discussed in topics covering lack of belonging (topic 48), worthlessness(topic 45), guilt and shame (topic 63), being a burden (topic 74), having nothing left (topic 88), not knowing what the point of life is (topic 104), and feeling numb (topic 111). these topics were not absent from the men's dataset, represented in topics on guilt and shame (topic 67), worthlessness (topic 72), not knowing what's real (topic 107), feeling empty (164), and being being a burden (110). for the men's dataset, topics related to feeling trapped or controlled were more prevalent than in the women's dataset. these topics comprised representations of not wanting to live anymore (topic 88), not wanting to be here anymore (topic 92), reactions of anger and upset (topic 129, 139), stress (topic 141), control ( topic 167), not being able to stand life (topic 174), being crushed (topic 178), and exhaustion (topic 139, 186). however, similar topics were also present in the women's dataset, although less frequently. these topics covered representations of not being able to take it anymore (topic 132), life being too much (topic 164), wanting to escape (topic 166), not being able to handle life (topic 182), and being tired (topic 53). ## analysis according to fearon, social categories can be further subdivided into role and type categories, where performance of the role and and the principles associated with the role, or type, help individuals orient themselves within society @xcite . while we have offered his definition of social identity through social category, he distinguishes social identity from personal identity, or "distinguishing features of a person that form the basis of his or her dignity or self-respect" @xcite . it is through the interaction of social and personality identity that it becomes possible to understand moral regulation online and its impact on suicidality.