Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides: Celebrities who die by suicide can elicit relatively strong copycat effects, but Google never displayed preventive information in celebrity-suicide-related searches

Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides using agent-based testing: A cross-national study in four European countries. Florian Arendt, Mario Haim, Sebastian Scherr. Social Science & Medicine, February 5 2020, 112692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112692

Highlights
•    Celebrities who die by suicide can elicit relatively strong copycat effects.
•    Internet search engines may play an increasingly important role for suicide prevention.
•    Google's suicide-prevention result (SPR) presents preventive information.
•    Yet Google never displayed SPRs in celebrity-suicide-related searches.
•    Higher SPR display rates may contribute to saving the lives of vulnerable users.

Abstract
Rationale Google can act as a “gatekeeper” for individuals who seek suicide-related information online (e.g., “how to kill oneself”). The search engine displays a “suicide-prevention result” (SPR) at the very top of some suicide-related search results. This SPR comes as an info box and contains supposedly helpful crisis help information such as references to a telephone counseling service.

Objective It remains unknown, however, how Google has implemented the SPR in the especially dangerous context of celebrity suicide for which imitational copycat suicides in vulnerable individuals are most likely.

Method Relying on agent-based testing, a computational social science method, we emulated a total of 137,937 Google searches in April 2019, using both general suicide-related and specific celebrity suicide-related search terms. Given the recently discovered language-based differences in SPR display rates, we held the language constant and focused on German-speaking populations in four European countries.

Results The SPR was never shown in searches for celebrities who died by suicide in all four countries. Furthermore, analyses indicated a digital divide in access to suicide-prevention information with moderately high SPR display rates in Germany and Switzerland, yet with no display in Austria and Belgium.

Conclusion Higher SPR display rates could support global suicide-prevention efforts at virtually no cost by providing preventive information to vulnerable users precisely at the moment when it is apparently needed.