Understanding the Trend of Hashtags Attached to Problematic Posting Using Quantitative Text Analysis: Toward the Development of a Detection System for Prostitution Activities in Cyberspace

Abstract

Due to the widespread popularity of smartphones and social media to people specially to youths, the risk and danger in people’s life is increasing. This research focused on ‘prostitution’ which has become a serious social pathology problem in recent years, analyzed the use of hashtags attached to problematic postings on Twitter using quantitative text analysis as one factor contributing to the issue. From the results, it was possible to classify seven groups with hashtags of high frequency appearance. Among them, it became clear that the co-occurrence relation between “area names” and “prostitution (indirect expression)” is especially strong. Such findings can be expected to lead to effective preliminary detection in cyber patrol.