Primary Investigator:
Tatiana Ringenberg

Project Members
Doetri Ghosh, Donna Prince

'Pedohunters' pose as children online to catch adults soliciting minors. They often upload confrontation videos with those solicitors. Research shows mixed public reactions to pedohunter content. Prior work has mainly examined perceptions in asynchronous formats. The following project addresses this gap by exploring live, real-time reactions on a Twitch stream. Three qualitative coders engaged in open coding of physical actions found in each of the three videos analyzed. Then, code was discussed and aggregated accordingly. Additionally, sentiment analysis on comment over time was conducted as well as thematic analysis to find patterns in comments. The sentiment analysis reveals a notable change in sentiment over the course of the three videos. Findings show six significant emerging themes from the viewer commentary.