Naver, Kakao tighten media partnership rules

Vague standard on restriction remains in question

By Yoon Sung-won

Naver and Kakao, the nation’s largest online media platforms, may impose sanctions on news media that post plagiarized articles or provocative advertisements and even force them off their platforms, the two companies’ media partnership assessment committee said, Thursday.

“We have prepared for the rules to assess Naver and Kakao’s media partnership and restriction, aiming at boosting legitimacy and reliability in the process,” the committee’s chairman Heo Nam-chin said during a press conference in Seoul, Thursday. “We expected that the regulation we announce today will contribute to upgrading domestic Internet environment.”

Naver and Kakao have called for civil society to establish an assessing body for its media partnership. Following an agreement on September last year, a total of 15 organizations from expert groups and consumer communities have cooperated to build a 30-member committee.

According to the committee’s new rules, only media entities that have been registered and approved as providers of newspapers, periodicals, broadcasting content, Internet news or a news agency can apply for the partnership. The rules also state that news providers should have a certain level of news production capability as well as technologies capable of transmitting news articles and operating Internet news websites.

Once news providers apply for a partnership with the platform operators, the committee will conduct qualitative and quantitative assessments on the news media. Naver and Kakao will decide how to build partnerships with the media based on this assessment.

The committee said the platform operators may restrict distribution of news articles of the news providers repeatedly posting articles with the same content, overusing keywords only to lure more hits, posting advertisements in the form of a news article, releasing suggestive articles and advertisements and being unable to access to the online articles due to technological or security problems.

News providers that breach the rules will accumulate penalty points and receive warnings. Their news distribution can be discontinued for up to 48 hours if they have more than 10 points. The media partnership can be cancelled if the providers failed to rectify the problems. The penalty points are accumulated on a 12-month basis and will be initialized after then, said the committee.

“The restrictions do not aim at weeding out certain media,” Kim Byoung-hee, the committee’s sub-chairman heading a group dedicated for the restriction rules. “We expect the rules may vitalize the self-purification function in the media industry. We have focused on establishing an environment where media can concentrate only on producing quality news articles.”

However, the committee has failed to elaborate on clear standards on how to determine that an article has been plagiarized.

“Posting carbon copies of press released provided by companies and the government is against journalistic ethics,” Heo said.

Naver and Kakao also faced criticism because they did not take action to tackle problems caused by the provision of a real-time Internet hit list. The list has been repeated blamed for providing a major cause of suggestive articles and advertisement on the Internet.

“Though it is an important issue, the Internet hit list is connected to Naver and Kakao’s business operation,” Heo said. “Our plan is to first encourage media to follow the rules.”