"I Was Told to Come Back and Share This": Social Media-Based Near-Death Experience Disclosures as Expressions of Spiritual Beliefs
Yifan Zhao, Yuxin Fang, Yihuan Chen, RAY LC
TL;DR
The paper investigates how TikTok users disclose near-death experiences (NDEs) and how audiences engage through comments, revealing that spiritual themes dominate most narratives. It applies a mixed-method analysis of 9,868 English NDE self-disclosure videos and 1,943 comments, using grounded theory and multimodal discourse analysis to classify NDE types, narrative motivations, and interaction patterns. Key contributions include identifying three disclosure motivations (self-expression, identity clarification, information sharing), three main video forms (initial disclosures, comment-driven replies, serial updates), and three comment cultures (supportive, faith-based, reflective), with S-NDEs eliciting stronger religious engagement. The findings suggest design implications for testimony-oriented and thanatosensitivity-aware platforms to support respectful, meaning-focused online communities, and indicate avenues for expanding cross-cultural research on online death related disclosures.
Abstract
People who experienced near-death events often turn to personal expression as a way of processing trauma and articulating beliefs. While scholars have examined how individuals share near-death experiences (NDEs), limited research has explored how these narratives are communicated collaboratively on today's social media platforms. We analyzed 200 randomly sampled TikTok videos tagged with #nde and related hashtags. Content analysis revealed that individuals often use NDE narratives to articulate personal meaning, with spiritual and religious themes appearing in the majority of posts and serving as a means of exploring and making sense of personal spiritual perspectives. Consistent with this, analyses of comment sections reveal that videos containing spiritual themes tend to attract more engagement and foster deeper conversations around faith and meaning. Our findings offer insights into how online platforms facilitate community-level engagement with spirituality, and suggest implications for design of spaces that support shared expression and connection in specialized communities.