Non-English speaker less likely to get automated suicide-prevention advice from Google

Do people with suicidal thoughts see potentially life-saving information when they go online? It may depend on the language they’re using, research shows.

Sebastian Scherr, an assistant professor at KU Leuven’s School for Mass Communication Research, has discovered that when it comes to online searches not all languages are created equal. 

Together with Mario Haim and Florian Arendt, two colleagues at the University of Munich (LMU), he discovered that English-language Google users with suicidal thoughts are far more likely to see an infobox prompting them to seek help than speakers of any other language. 

Why does this matter? Because people with suicidal thoughts who seek information online are at their most vulnerable, Scherr says. ...

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