사적제재에 대한 대중의 인식분석: 텍스트 마이닝 기법을 중심으로

초록

Against the backdrop of growing distrust in the existing judicial system and the widening gap between legal judgment and public sentiment, private sanctions have become a subject of controversy regarding their legitimacy. Accordingly, this study utilized various text mining techniques on YouTube comments to analyze the public perception structure of private sanctions and to examine the formation processes of social emotions and reasoning that justify or criticize such actions. Furthermore, the study identified factors influencing these perceptions and categorized types of the public supporting private sanctions based on common patterns of responses. Ten news videos containing the keyword “vigilantism” were selected, and analyses including ‘Frequency analysis’, ‘TF-IDF’, ‘LDA Topic Modeling’, ‘Semantic Network analysis’, and ‘CONCOR analysis’ were conducted using R 4.4.3 and UCINET 3.0. The results revealed that, first, low trust in the judicial system and public authority was a major factor contributing to the emergence and spread of vigilantism. Distrust in formal sanctions creates gaps in institutional enforcement, which citizens fill through vigilante actions, a process that is further accelerated in online spaces. Second, public perceptions of vigilantism were classified into three types: (1) Vigilante critic, (2) Offender critic, (3) Distrust in the judicial system. Public evaluation was centered on two axes: (1) Severity of the act that prompted vigilantism and (2) Legitimacy of the vigilante act. Specifically, people assessed both the appropriateness of the act and the intent of the actor, and perceived legitimacy varied depending on whether the act was reasonably performed according to social and legal standards and whether the actor intended to enforce justice. The study contributes to the literature by empirically examining vivid public discourse on vigilantism, revealing social perception structures that previous studies have insufficiently addressed. Furthermore, public discourse in comments reflects broader societal sentiments toward the law and levels of trust in the judicial system, and judgments regarding the legitimacy of vigilantism are influenced by psychological, environmental, and cognitive factors in combination.

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