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. 2023 Sep 25:7:e42857.
doi: 10.2196/42857.

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

Sarit Kang-Auger  1 , Antoine Lewin  2   3 , Aimina Ayoub  4   5 , Marianne Bilodeau-Bertrand  5 , Sophie Marcoux  4   5 , Nathalie Auger  4   5   6   7
Affiliations

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

Sarit Kang-Auger et al. JMIR Form Res. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; injury; mortality; mortality rate; selfie; social media; time series regression; web-based news.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Monthly number of selfie-related deaths before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2014 to April 2021). Dots represent the number of deaths per month. The solid line represents the predicted trend in the monthly number of deaths from the interrupted time series regression model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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