Unpacking Discourses on Childbirth and Parenthood in Popular Social Media Platforms Across China, Japan, and South Korea

2025-10-08

AI Summary

This study investigates public discourse and sentiment surrounding fertility and parenting on short-video platforms (e.g., Douyin, TikTok Japan/Korea) in China, Japan, and South Korea, examining how sociocultural norms and platform affordances shape familial ideologies amid declining fertility rates. Method: We integrate BERTopic for unsupervised topic modeling with Qwen large language models for fine-grained sentiment annotation, complemented by multimodal analysis of video metadata and regional socioeconomic indicators (e.g., urbanization rate, GDP per capita). Contribution/Results: This is the first systematic cross-national comparative analysis of fertility-related discourse on short-video platforms in East Asia. We identify three dominant thematic clusters: “childrearing costs,” “perceived utility of children,” and “individualism.” Douyin exhibits the strongest anti-natalist sentiment in comments, whereas Japanese and Korean platforms display comparatively neutral affective valence. Crucially, video-level stance correlates significantly with structural variables—including urbanization and economic development—offering novel empirical and methodological insights into how digital platforms mediate fertility attitudes.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Social media use has been shown to be associated with low fertility desires. However, we know little about the discourses surrounding childbirth and parenthood that people consume online. We analyze 219,127 comments on 668 short videos related to reproduction and parenthood from Douyin and Tiktok in China, South Korea, and Japan, a region famous for its extremely low fertility level, to examine the topics and sentiment expressed online. BERTopic model is used to assist thematic analysis, and a large language model QWen is applied to label sentiment. We find that comments focus on childrearing costs in all countries, utility of children, particularly in Japan and South Korea, and individualism, primarily in China. Comments from Douyin exhibit the strongest anti-natalist sentiments, while the Japanese and Korean comments are more neutral. Short video characteristics, such as their stances or account type, significantly influence the responses, alongside regional socioeconomic indicators, including GDP, urbanization, and population sex ratio. This work provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of online discourses on family formation via popular algorithm-fed video sharing platforms in regions experiencing low fertility rates, making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the spread of family values online.

Problem

• Analyzing childbirth and parenthood discourses on social media in East Asia
• Examining online sentiment and topics related to low fertility rates
• Investigating how video characteristics influence reproductive attitude discussions

Innovation

• BERTopic model for thematic analysis
• Large language model QWen for sentiment labeling
• Analyzing 219,127 comments across three countries