Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
      133·
      3 months ago

      Businesses do not care about people, I can pretty much guarantee those were added in order to waive liability. Example: person commits suicide because they see it in a show, family sues show company because that is linked to the person’s suicide, arguing the show encouraged the person to do it.

      Would that hold up in court? I don’t know, probably not, but the company doesn’t want to deal with that. So they add a warning instead so they can just point to that and it gets thrown out immediately.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
      113·
      3 months ago

      But do we have evidence they’re effective?

      It still takes effort/time/money to do this, and if it has no impact, then that effort/time/money could be used on things that are known to be effective.

      I have no idea how much effect they have. It’s possible they have a negative effect.

      Op’s question is do we have that information?

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
        168·
        3 months ago

        How much effort/time/money do you think they put into that white text on black background that’s on screen for like 5 seconds?

        It’s negligible, I would be shocked if it wasn’t the same recycled card over and over again that they have some unpaid intern throw in at some point in the final editing stages

        It would probably cost more effort/time/money to do a study on its effectiveness than the pre roll does many times over lmao

        • Krono@lemmy.today
          41·
          3 months ago

          It’s not about the production cost, its about the opportunity cost.

          A quick google search tells me a national ad costs $200k-$1m for a 30s slot. That means 5 seconds of screen time costs $30k-$150k.