Looking out for each other online: Digital outreach, emotional surveillance and safe(r) spaces

This article is concerned with what it means to think of online spaces as emotionally safe or safer. It does this by looking at the sharing of emotional distress online and the role of organisations in identifying and proactively engaging with such distress. This latter type of digital engagement is analytically interesting and rendered increasingly feasible by algorithmic developments, but its implications are relatively unexplored. Such interventions tend to be understood dualistically: as a form of supportive digital outreach or as emotional surveillance. Through an analysis of blog data about a Twitter-based suicide prevention app, this article attempts to understand the tensions and also the potential points of connection between these two meanings of ‘looking out for each other’ online. From an avowedly relational and emotional perspective, it tries to offer a more nuanced account of what it might mean to share emotional distress ‘safely’ online.