The spread of fear of crime through social media comments: Analyzing YouTube comments using like count

Fear of crime has been extensively studied in the context of mass media exposure. However, the mechanisms underlying fear of crime in social networking sites (SNS) remain unclear. This study examines whether comments expressing stronger fear of crime are more likely to spread on SNS, with a focus on YouTube comments on crime-related videos. By vectorizing both the items in the psychological scale measuring fear of crime and the comments into numerical representations, cosine similarity was calculated to assess the extent to which the comments reflect the fear of crime (FoC) scores. The relationship between the FoC score and the number of likes was analyzed using a hurdle negative binomial regression model to account for the zero-inflated nature of the data. The findings demonstrate that comments with higher FoC scores are significantly more likely to receive “likes,” supporting the hypothesis that the fear of crime influences information dissemination on SNS. Unlike traditional mass media, where profit motives often drive the overrepresentation of violent crime, this study suggests that the phenomenon on SNS can be explained by human risk-management tendencies, as outlined in the error management theory. The findings carry important implications for understanding the social dynamics of crime-related discourse on SNS, including the potential for fear of crime to be amplified in online environments. It is imperative to conduct further research to examine the temporal and platform-specific dynamics of this relationship, as well as its broader societal impact.