Purpose This study aims to analyze online malicious comments not as simple emotional expressions but as issue-based discourse structures, quantitatively identifying the formation and diffusion patterns of social conflicts.
Design/Methodology/Approac...
Purpose This study aims to analyze online malicious comments not as simple emotional expressions but as issue-based discourse structures, quantitatively identifying the formation and diffusion patterns of social conflicts.
Design/Methodology/Approach A total of 59,654 comments from the KBS News YouTube channel were collected between May and September 2025. A dictionary of 113 malicious keywords was constructed, and ten major topics were derived using Sentence-BERT–based BERTopic modeling. The core keywords of each topic were visualized through co-occurrence network (SNA) analysis, and weekly weight variations were examined using a heatmap-based time series analysis.
Findings “Political conflict and power criticism” and “media distrust” emerged as the dominant issues, while keywords such as rebellion, impeachment, fake news, and fraud functioned as central hubs in the network. Particularly during the third week of June and the second week of September, an issue-reactive pattern appeared, indicating that malicious comments serve as a structural medium for the spread of public opinion online.