Testing the impact of the #chatsafe social media intervention on young people’s ability to communicate safely online about suicide: a randomised-controlled trial

Intervention description The 8-week intervention will comprise 24 pieces of content; three per week. The intervention group will receive the #chatsafe suicide prevention content. Participants will receive their content via text message once per week, with links to the weekly content hosted on Instagram. Because of the rolling recruitment used in the trial, all of the trial content is already on the trial Instagram page so appropriate links can be sent to participants as they move through the trial. The campaign content educates participants across four core areas: a) talking safely about suicide online; b) sharing your own thoughts, feelings or experiences with suicide safely online; c) responding to someone who may be suicidal; and d) communicating safely about someone has died by suicide. Content is in the form of 3 Instagram posts per week (sent together on one occasion), with posts having between 1-8 'tiles' with the caption containing further information for each topic. Throughout the campaign, different mediums are used including still image, video, digital art, animation, block text and mobile phone screen recordings. For example, the week 3, post 3 content uses a series of images describing how to create content warnings. The post has 4 tiles, that describe why content warnings are used, how to create a content warning, and support services that can be included in content warnings. The caption gives further context to the post. Once per week, the text message will be sent containing a link to the content. Halfway through each survey period, a follow-up engagement text message will be sent either reminding participants to complete their survey or checking in and offering assistance with participation. The trial content was co-designed with young people. First, the entire #chatsafe program of work has been conceptualised, designed, and conducted in partnership with young people. The guidelines themselves (that the trial content is based off) were created using the Delphi consensus method, with young people as an expert panel. The first #chatsafe social media campaign was co-created in partnership with over 140 young people, across a series of workshops each containing up to 20 young people. For the trial content specifically, two youth workshops (N = 26) were conducted to assist with the initial planning of the trial in April 2021. The study was then presented to the Orygen Youth Research Council (YRC) in November 2021 and feedback on intervention development and study conduct was obtained from 8 young people. Next, three co-design workshops were conducted in April and May 2022 (N = 46) to help create the trial content. These workshops were facilitated by creative agency Portable, who created the final Instagram posts that will be used.