FROM SOLIDARITY TO SURVIVAL: AN ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSITION OF SECURITY PERCEPTIONS IN THE KOREAN DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE DURING THE UKRAINE WAR USING KOBERT

Abstract

This study examines how security perceptions in Korea’s digital public sphere shifted in relation to the Ukraine war. Drawing on 101,900 items of portal news comments and YouTube news comments collected between 2022 and 2025, it applies sentiment-based discourse analysis using KoBERT. Rather than relying on a simple positive–negative split, the analysis classifies discourse into seven emotion categories and then consolidates them into security-relevant dimensions—threat perception, hostility, and humanitarian solidarity—to trace how emotional configurations evolve over time. The results indicate that Korea’s security framing moved from an initially value-oriented stance centered on humanitarian solidarity, through a period of economic pragmatism as the war prolonged, and then shifted markedly toward an existential, survival-oriented mode following reports of North Korean troop deployments. This transition is captured by the Security Sentiment Transfer Index (SSTI) developed in this study, which rose from 0.85 in the outbreak phase to 4.80 during the deployment period. The pattern suggests that when external security crises become linked to domestically salient conditions, public interpretation tends to converge on survival concerns while normative evaluation recedes. Platform-level comparisons further show that SSTI values are consistently higher on YouTube than on portal news comments, with the largest divergence observed during the deployment period. This gap aligns with the role of visually driven content and recommendation dynamics in intensifying high-arousal emotions such as fear and anger. In addition, keyword-weight analysis identifies concrete terms—most notably “conscription” and “nuclear”—as salient triggers associated with the sharpest increases in SSTI, indicating that perceived proximity to personal safety and national vulnerability amplifies security sensitivity. Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of the emotional configuration of digital discourse as a factor in shifts in security perception. The study therefore argues that national crisis management may benefit from security communication strategies that address the public’s perceived existential risk and micro-level anxieties, rather than treating security messaging as a one-way transmission of situational information.