Abstract:
As cyber space becomes an avenue for people to express themselves, social media becomes another avenue for adolescents, particularly college students, to express their feelings and emotions through different social networking sites, one of them being Twitter. With the increasing number of incidents people use social media to express and voice out their distress, it is extremely important to study the available social support system the distressed individuals can get online. With this, a mixed methods research was conducted to study the awareness, attitude, behavior, and perceived effectiveness of Twitter users who are readers of distressed tweets. The study showed how the college students were highly aware of the presence of distressed tweets on Twitter and their attitude towards them include sympathy, sadness, and worry. The study also found out that people were willing to offer help and support to these individuals. The themes gathered in this study also included the different expression of distress the participants were able to observe, the kind of support offered, the different factors for helping, and their perception on the effectiveness of their actions.
