Naver to stop 'curating' news articles

Naver CEO Han Seong-sook speaks at a press conference held at the Naver Partner Square in Seoul's Gangnam-gu, Wednesday, announcing measures to address a controversy over what critics said was the firm's 'overpowered' news editing. / Courtesy of Naver

By Jun Ji-hye

Naver will stop selecting and arranging news articles on its main portal page and news section later this year, to handle criticism about its neutrality, the firm's CEO said Wednesday.

“From the third quarter, Naver will stop editing a list of news articles,” Han Seong-sook said in a press conference in Seoul.

Naver will instead give each media company authority to select and arrange its stories to be displayed on the nation's top portal.

“Naver will offer media companies related advertising revenue and data on readers,” Han said.

The announcement came amid mounting controversy over an opinion-rigging scandal, in which a “power blogger” nicknamed Druking and two of his followers allegedly manipulated voting on news articles and reader comments displayed by the web portal in an attempt to manipulate public sentiment in favor of or against certain political figures.

Han said the company has discussed structural problems involving the ongoing controversy and came up with measures to improve this.

She noted one of the core problems was structure whereby its 30 million users concentrated on a few “top stories” selected by the portal.

Han said the improvement measures were designed to diversify ways for users to read the news.

Naver will also remove a list of articles from its start page and provide only a search engine feature there, Han said. This will be applied from the third quarter as well.

News articles selected by media companies will be located on a second page, and users can select certain media firms to read their stories.

“This measure is to offer users news articles selected in accordance with each media firm's editorial rights,” Han said. “Users will be able to read more diverse news articles that match with their interests.”

The firm will create another news section powered by its artificial intelligence (AI) news recommendation technology, AiRS.

The CEO also said the firm will actively push to introduce the outlink system used by major portals such as Google. Some politicians have called on the Korean firm to use this system, claiming it is more effective at preventing opinion-rigging.

Under the current “inlink” system, Naver hosts articles and runs the comments section within its website, in contrast to an outlink system that links users to a specific article hosted on the website of a media company.

“In principle, I agree with the need to introduce the outlink system,” Han said. “But it is difficult to adopt the system comprehensively as media companies have differing opinions. We will actively push to introduce the system through consultation with each firm.”

She added it was premature to talk about when the relevant guidelines for such a system will be drawn up as there was much to be discussed.

However, Rep. Kim Kyung-jin of the Party for Democracy and Peace said Naver's improvement measures still seem insufficient. If the portal gives each media firm a choice on whether to move to the outlink system, not many companies will join it as the influence of Naver's platform is still powerful, the first-term lawmaker claimed.