Young content creators around self-harm: identifying metalanguages on X (Twitter)
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Abstract
Given the increase in non-suicidal self-harm among minors, this research focuses on the content generated by young people on the social network X (formerly Twitter). They are part of a digital community and create verbal and non-verbal linguistic codes around self-harm. To identify them, the following objectives were set: 1) to identify the languages prevalent in tweets linked to self-harm, 2) to find out the hashtags and specific words linked to self-harm in tweets and 3) to understand the meaning of the emoticons they use and share in tweets. To do this, quantitative and qualitative research was carried out. Through an API that collected a total of 187,906 tweets on Twitter, from 66,732 different users, between November 2022 and June 2023 about self-harm. From this total, a qualitative analysis was carried out on 1000 tweets that had the highest number of likes per week. Among the main results obtained, it is highlighted that the most spoken languages in the world after Mandarin Chinese are used: English and Spanish. Likewise, young people have generated a slang of hashtags and specific words linked to self-harm on the networks so as not to be identified by the networks; and they show their emotions through emoticons.
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