Netizens locked in 'ideological warfare'
Kim Si-won, 18, a high school student, holds a placard in Insa-dong, downtown Seoul, Saturday to protest against a conservative website, Ilbe, for defaming the 1980 pro-democracy uprising in Gwangju. The protest came in celebration of the 33rd anniversary of the uprising. Kim said in the banner that he is proud of the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Movement that sowed seeds of democracy in Korea. / Yonhap
Cyber-row between liberals and conservatives spreads into real world
By Nam Hyun-woo
With the Internet becoming much more than an esoteric place for political discussion forums, the ideological impact of online communities in Korea has evolved from cyberspace chitchat into tangible conflict.
In the forefront of the expanding confrontation are community websites Ilbe (www.ilbe.com) and Today’s Humor (TH) (www.todayhumor.co.kr). Alongside their presence in cyberspace, Ilbe and TH now appear frequently in news cycles in the real world.
The communities originally started as trolling sites such as 9gag.com of the U.S.
As Internet users sprouted and they invented insider-terms, the users of such sites bonded and hunted others who did not agree with them.
Message boards on the sites read like the inside of a high-school bathroom cubicle filled with obscene and difficult insider-slang built on anonymity, deception and delight in playing with the media.
The anonymity allowed Internet users to freely or violently express their liberal political ideas, which have been considered taboo in Korea until the early 2000s, in cyberspace.
A netizen claims in the posting of a conservative website, Ilbe, that the May 18, 1980, Gwangju Democratic Movement was a riot, rather than a pro-democracy uprising. He also claimed that the statues of protesters, erected in the National May 18 Cemetery in the southwestern city of Gwangju, show they were armed with weapons seized from the military. / Capture image of Ilbe
Liberal Internet users overwhelmed online communities. Conservatives had to seek other places to express their opinions.
Young conservatives flocked to Ilbe and the humor board became an online community representing conservative ideas, while TH consolidated its status as a leading liberal website.
According to data provided by Rankey.com, an average 695,580 people visited Ilbe a week in April using PCs, while an average 888,320 accessed the site during the same period through mobile devices. Ilbe is the most visited site among similar kinds, followed by TH.
As the two communities grew as the leading Internet sites representing opposing ideologies, battles against each other ignited and became an online ideological war.
On Dec. 14, 2012, five days before the country’s 19th presidential election, anti-Ilbe communities attacked the conservative site. They plastered Ilbe with posts and paralyzed the site by overloading its server.
A month later, Ilbe members countered by refreshing liberal sites endlessly ― they called it “codename: industrialization.”
During the mission, Ilbe users hacked the TH administrator’s account and allowed its members to rush into TH and paralyze it.
As the numbers of members of the two sites increased, they did not confine themselves to cyberspace, but actively engaged in matters in the real world.
However, as they turned their crosshairs to the issues of the real world, their biased and raw opinion at the same time caused controversy.
During former President Lee Myung-bak’s administration, TH took the lead role in encouraging people to stage massive candlelit protests against the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and imports of American beef.
TH was seen to have exerted the greatest influence in stirring up public sentiment. Politicians started to take notice of the trend of online public sentiment triggered mostly by TH members.
Opposition presidential candidate Moon Jae-in posted content on TH to garner their support.
During the last presidential election, spokespersons from both conservative and liberal camps argued with each other mentioning TH and Ilbe.
This led to a wide-range probe on alleged poll intervention by the country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).
Prosecutors raided the headquarters of the NIS on April 30 to investigate allegations that agents might have attempted to influence the election by posting “malicious replies and messages” discrediting Moon on TH from last September.
Ilbe: conservatives or neo-Nazi?
Between the two websites, the more actively and ferociously engaged in the real world is Ilbe, although some of its members’ moves and rhetoric are deemed are neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi.
On May 10, an entertainment agency representing Hwang Min-u, better known as “Little Psy,” filed a complaint against 8 Ilbe users who allegedly posted racial slurs and other insults abusing the 8-year-old boy.
Hwang, born to a Korean father and a Vietnamese mother, leapt to stardom when he featured in the rapper’s “Gangnam Style” music video. But the Ilbe bullies made him a target of online abuse, calling Hwang the “child of an inferior race.”
On May 14, Jeon Hyo-sung, a singer of the female pop group Secret, came under fire after she ignorantly said in a radio interview that “We are a team that respects the individuality of each member, because we don’t do the democratization thing.”
The most famous Ilbe-term, “democratization,” is misleadingly used to mean “monoculture,” “uniformity” or “crowd justice,” unlike its actual meaning: “to make or become democratic.”
Instead of “dislike” buttons, the ultra-conservative website uses “democratization” button, with a thumb down symbol.
While most Korean Internet users denounced her as idiotic, or may be Ilbe-like biased, Ilbe users hailed her nicknaming her “Ilbe Goddess.”
Alongside “democratization,” many words are used as different or opposite from their original meanings in the Ilbe language world.
They call the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Movement a “riot” and insult former sex slaves of the Japan’s wartime military as “prostitutes on an expedition.”
On the other hand, they praise former President Chun Doo-hwan, the strongman who ruled the country with his iron fist in the 1980s, as “Chun-tank,” adding tank, the symbol of his dictatorship, after his surname.
For a country that experienced a painful process in achieving democracy, which was accompanied by bloody civilian suppression and the marginalizing of working-class citizens, the fact that they use these terms with such an interpretation draws criticism from other non-Ilbe netizens.
The administrator of Ilbe notifies that “Postings harming others, exposing others’ personal information, containing obscene material, racial or nationalistic slurs are strictly prohibited on this site and violators will be banned from accessing it.”
But it affects almost no one, since the site attracted the huge number of current users by minimizing administrators’ interference in users’ postings.
An Ilbe user said on condition of anonymity that “Do not try to understand or comprehend Ilbe or TH users and things done by us and them with logic. It is just a phenomenon that happens that cannot be explained.”
“Having fun in the community is just all,” said the user in his early 20s.
Asked if he ever felt guilty that someone might hurt because of reckless rhetoric or activities, he said “You can’t live in the Internet era with such a sentimental mindset.”
“Do not judge all Ilbe users’ as villains. Things in Ilbe are raw expressions of what its users believe. Many Ilbe users’ probably agree with me,” he added.
Anti-Ilbe users argue that the ultra-conservative community should be designated as a harmful website and be blocked.
An official at the Korea Communications Standards Commission said that if a website is operated for illegal purposes, it can be forcibly shut down. But it is difficult to call Ilbe an illegal website, because it is a community site where netizens post their opinions freely, he said.