Kim Rahn is the managing editor of The Korea Times. Since joining the company in 2003, she has covered various beats including the presidential office, Seoul city government, the Bank of Korea and the tourism industry. In 2014, she won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for her coverage of the ordeals of migrant women in Korea.
Over 170 news websites carry lewd ads
By Kim Rahn
More than 170 online news outlets carry lewd advertisements that could be “harmful to youth,” according to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
The ministry said Monday it found 176 news websites with ads referring to sexual intercourse either in words or photos in research carried out from March to May.
It monitored websites of 3,216 news outlets registered with the culture ministry in 2012. Of them, 176 or 5.5 percent allowed obscene ads to be seen by all readers including minors.
This figure is almost threefold from last year’s 62. In 2011, 2,438 news outlet websites were registered.
“These ads are not legally designated as harmful to youths because they don’t directly show sex. But they are harmful enough because they describe lascivious and shameful content, such as repeatedly emphasizing a woman’s lower part of the body in a bikini or showing a photo of a woman eating a banana with suggestive phrases beneath it,” a ministry official said.
The most frequently appearing ads are for food that manufacturers claim enhance “sexual ability,” followed by urology clinics, health foods, sex toys and plastic surgery clinics.
The offending ads contain phrases describing sexual acts or sex organs, remarks intended to arouse sexual desire or photos showing breasts, hips or thighs.
“Twenty of the 176 websites contained half of the lewd ads, 460 out of 915 items,” the official said.
One of the sites even allowed all visitors access to ads acknowledged as “harmful to youths” without a process to check whether people visiting the site are adults or minors.
“Last December, online newspapers announced a guideline on Internet ads. But the research showed the number of such obscene ads increased,” he said.
Following the research, the ministry plans to ask the 176 news outlets to improve the criteria for advertisements to be placed, as well as urge the Korea Internet Newspaper Association and the Korea Online Newspaper Association to adopt their own screening systems.
It will also call for the Korea Communications Standards Commission to review whether the ads are harmful to youths. If the ads are designated so, access for minors to the sites will be restricted.