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

TL;DR

This study addresses how online platforms shape perceptions of childbirth and parenthood in East Asia's low-fertility context. It combines large-scale comment data from Douyin and TikTok with BERTopic topic modeling and Tongyi Qwen sentiment labeling to map content themes and sentiment across China, Japan, and South Korea, linking responses to video features and regional socioeconomic indicators. The findings reveal five core content dimensions—Health, Population Structure, Childrearing Cost, Utility, and Values—with country-specific emphasis, and show that CN exhibits the strongest anti-natalist sentiment while JP and KR are more neutral; video stance, account type, and regional context significantly shape responses. These insights advance understanding of how algorithm-driven short-video feeds propagate family-values narratives and influence fertility-related attitudes in societies with extremely low fertility, informing fertility policy and digital-sociology research.

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: 21 topic themes and their corresponding five theoretical dimensions.
• Figure 2: Distribution of the five theoretical dimensions in (1) China; (2) Japan; (3) South Korean.
• Figure 3: Word cloud map of (1) 17 themes in Chinese Comments; (2) 18 themes in Japanese Comments; (3) 16 themes in South Korean Comments.
• Figure 4: Levels of anti-natalist sentiment across the Chinese provinces, Japan, and South Korea.
• Figure 5: The distribution of anti-natalist sentiments across five dimensions in CN, JP, and SK.