Chinese cyberspace was recently convulsed by a suicide broadcast live on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter. In late November, a 19-year-old in Luzhou, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, posted dozens of messages describing his feelings during the suicide process. Although local police were called in and located him, they failed to save him in time.

What prompted the teenager surnamed Zeng to commit suicide seems to have been a breakup with a girl whom he met online just a week prior. From his posts, which have been deleted following his death, it's not hard to detect the teenager's hesitation, vulnerability and even regret, rather than pure despair.

It's not the first time that a suicide was broadcast online. While in most cases suicide is carried out in private, individuals who broadcast their suicide try to demonstrate that they long for a great deal of attention, care and communication.

Many Net users who noticed Zeng reposted his messages and wrote him tens of thousands of comments to encourage him to live on and not to give up easily, trying to bring him back.

However, there were also onlookers who apparently took the suicide lightly. They liked the posts and even impatiently pushed Zeng to hurry up when the teenager backtracked on his decision in the process. To them Zeng said "sorry" in one of his last posts.

There is no evidence showing what impact these impatient comments may have had on Zeng's death. But it's certain that for a desperate person, these words would only damage any little interest they had left in clinging to life. Indifference or sarcasm is unacceptable. Society can do more than just watch.

People are sometimes tired of believing those seeming tragedies on social media which often turn out to be just stunts to garner public attention. However, when an incident cannot be verified instantly, viewers had better just watch quietly or even ignore it if they don't  want to do anything helpful. Joking can be a kind of abuse.

Data from a professor at Nanchang University shows there were more than 20 cases that of people posting suicidal inclination or last words on social media in the first three years of Weibo's popularity. Since no one knows whether similar cases would happen again, Weibo managers can at least do something to intervene in this process, such as restricting comments or even deleting the posts, in order to avoid copycat cases.

The next day after Zeng's death, three Net users expressed  intention to commit  suicide, which were luckily stopped. It's time for other parts of society, including police and social groups, to learn to deal with such emergencies quickly.

Time is everything in these cases.

Su Tan, a freelance writer based in Shanghai