Trend Analysis of ‘Child YouTube’ News Article before and during COVID-19 : An Exploration of Words Frequency & LDA Topic Model

This study explores the contents of news articles related to 'Children's YouTube' from year 2018 to 2021. The total of 7,029 news article was divided into two periods. In the first period between year 2018 and 2019 before COVID-19, the news articles were only interested in the commercial success of YouTube contents or sensational incidences related to children, whereas they were reported non-face-to-face events using YouTube during COVID-19 period between year 2020 and 2021, the second period. They also interested in children as perpetrators or used as synonymous with immaturity in the 2nd period. While the words that appeared mainly in the first period were related to famous content producers such as 'YouTuber', 'Toy', 'Pengsu', and 'Carry', the words that appeared mainly in the second period were many words related to content consumers and events such as 'Real-time', 'non-face-to-face/LAN', 'Library', and 'Children's Day'. According to our LDA topic models, news were worried about the the exposure of children to harmful contents, but in the second period, as it is seen in the complaints about the Minsik Act, the word children is used as a symbolic proxy of immaturity. These results are very different from the academic community's interest in preventing the exposure of children to harmful YouTube contents.