Suicide Communication on Twitter Regarding Celebrities' Death & Its Impact Among Young Adults in Klang Valley

Choong, Yan Yue (2020) Suicide Communication on Twitter Regarding Celebrities' Death & Its Impact Among Young Adults in Klang Valley. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

This project is to study on the suicide communication on Twitter regarding celebrities’ death and its impact among young adults in Klang Valley. Nowadays, most of the young adults are fragile and not tough enough to solve problems in their lives. Thus, they decided to give up their lives because they think that this is the only way to end the pain. However, the consequences of doing so have brought bad influence to the public especially the death of celebrities in this 21st century. Celebrities committing suicide has been an on-going ‘trend’ in the past few years especially in South Korea such as former KPOP girl group f(x) member Choi Sulli, Korean actress Park Jin Hee, lead singer from KPOP boy group SHINee, Kim Jonghyun. According to research, their deaths have a strong impact in ‘motivating’ the young adults who already have hidden suicidal intention to commit suicide. Hence, this project is to find out which features of celebrities’ death were associated to more emotionally grounded responses among Twitter users in Klang Valley and also the strategies for social media platform itself to dwindle the increased number of prominent suicides. Thereupon, two methods were used in conducting this research paper including online questionnaire survey and in-depth interview. 100 respondents who aged from 18 to 29 from Malaysia are the targeted audience for this survey questionnaire. Whereas, three experts from the media line were invited to share their opinions and suggestions on how to reduce the suicide rate in Malaysia. As a result, from online questionnaire survey, we found out that celebrities that died from cancer and suicide were associated to more emotionally grounded responses among Twitter users in Klang Valley. On the other hand, data collected from the in-depth interview concluded that social media should be aware of the ways of covering suicide news, always provide reliable information of suicide helpline and avoid using sensational headlines to increase their readership. In short, the findings that the researcher has obtained reached the objectives of the study which found out the most impactful features of celebrities’ death and the strategies suggested by the media expert.