Adultização Infantil e Regulação Digital: Uma Análise do Debate sobre a Lei nº 15.211/2025 no YouTube

  • Ester Souza UFSJ
  • Nathan Lima UFSJ
  • Vítor Amorim UFSJ
  • Mateus Brito UFSJ
  • Gabriel Prenassi UFSJ
  • Arthur Assis UFSJ
  • Henrique Teixeira UFSJ
  • Ana Cláudia Machado UFSJ
  • Diego Roberto Colombo Dias UFES
  • Leonardo Rocha UFSJ

Resumo


The public controversy surrounding child adultification and digital regulation gained major visibility in Brazil after the viral repercussion of Law No. 15.211/2025, popularly known as the “Lei Felca”. Although prior studies have examined child exposure, platform risks, and engagement dynamics in digital media, we still know little about how a recent and socially sensitive controversy is structured, circulated, and contested within large-scale audiovisual platforms. In this paper, we present a large-scale computational analysis of YouTube videos and comments discussing child adultification and the so-called Lei Felca. Our approach combines validated automatic transcriptions, metadata collection, topic modeling, sentiment classification, and linguistic analysis to examine how creators frame the debate, how audiences react to these frames, and how different publication formats shape visibility and interaction. The results show that the controversy is organized around distinct thematic frames, such as regulation, child exploitation, privacy, games, and political polarization, which are associated with different audience responses. We also find that traditional videos and YouTube Shorts play different roles in the platform ecology: long-form videos concentrate more technical, argumentative, and interactionintensive discussion, whereas Shorts favor rapid diffusion and visibility, but with limited conversion into effective debate. Finally, linguistic analyses reveal systematic adaptations in both creators’ discourse and audience comments according to topic, format, and polarization. Taken together, these findings show that YouTube is not merely a neutral host of this controversy, but an active environment that shapes how it is framed, amplified, and publicly negotiated.
Palavras-chave: Child Adultification, YouTube, Public Controversy, Short-form Video, Natural Language Processing

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Publicado
27/10/2026
SOUZA, Ester et al. Adultização Infantil e Regulação Digital: Uma Análise do Debate sobre a Lei nº 15.211/2025 no YouTube. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON MULTIMEDIA AND THE WEB (WEBMEDIA), 32. , 2026, Lavras/MG. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2026 . p. 56-65. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/webmedia.2026.30367.

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