Mental health disclosure shifts after twitter changes under elon musk
X-pressing Intimacy: Mental Health Disclosure After Twitter Acquisition
Social and Information NetworksComputation and LanguageComputers and SocietyHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
People often share their mental health experiences on social media to get support, but it is unclear how such sharing changes when a platform goes through big changes. This paper studies tweets about mental health topics like anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts before and after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022. The authors found that following the acquisition, language expressing feelings and social connection decreased, while personal and future-focused language increased. Different mental health conditions showed different changes in how deeply people shared their experiences.
What this means in practice
- •For social media platform designers: Design safer spaces that adapt to user changes in mental health disclosure after major platform ownership transitions.
- •For online community managers: Adjust moderation and support approaches based on detected shifts in language intimacy and mental health expression tied to platform governance changes.
Authors
Olivia Pal, Yunhao Yuan, Meghana Mandava, Talayeh Aledavood, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Koustuv Saha
Abstract
Social media platforms provide spaces for individuals to disclose mental health experiences and seek support, yet how these disclosures evolve during major shifts in platform governance remains unclear. We examine mental health self-disclosure surrounding Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition of Twitter, analyzing approximately 824K tweets across anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder (BD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and suicidal ideation (SI) or related experiences, alongside 266K comparison tweets. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and an LLM-based intimacy classifier, we characterize changes in psycholinguistic expression and disclosure intimacy. Following the acquisition, we observe declines in affective and social language, alongside increases in first-person singular pronouns and future-focused expressions. Intimacy patterns vary by condition: anxiety, depression, and BPD show increases in low-intimacy and decreases in moderate-intimacy disclosures, whereas suicide-related posts show more high-intimacy disclosures. However, compared with broader Twitter discourse, only the relative decline in moderate- versus low-intimacy disclosure for BPD remains statistically significant. Our findings underscore the importance of considering both language and intimacy when studying platform transitions, informing the design of online environments that support sensitive self-disclosure.