Bill to pre-screen music harmful to minors sparks censorship fears

Rapper PSY stands before a large crowd at a music event in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province, June 27. Courtesy of P NATION

A proposed bill requiring music distributors to screen song lyrics before release is sparking censorship concerns, with critics questioning how far the state should be allowed to go in policing creative content.

The amendment to the Music Industry Promotion Act was submitted last week by Rep. Kim Hyun and nine other lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea. The bill would require music distributors to pre-screen all tracks to determine whether they contain content harmful to minors before release.

If any song is judged harmful and its creator is under 19, the distributor must block the track from release altogether. If the artist is an adult, the distributor must notify them that the track may be designated harmful to youth in advance, which would restrict it to adult listeners only.

Under the current system, songs containing sexually explicit, violent or hateful content can be designated harmful to youth after release, which bans minors from accessing them and limits distribution. The Youth Protection Committee under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reviews content deemed harmful to youth after they have been released. Lawmakers behind the new bill believe this system leaves a loophole that allows harmful songs to spread online before review — sometimes created by teenagers who are aspiring musicians.

“Artistic freedom must be respected, but we cannot stand by and do nothing while hate- or crime-promoting songs are distributed online freely, harming peer communities, classrooms and ultimately society as a whole,” Kim said. “Because culture and the arts are the spiritual assets of society, any attempt to abuse them as a means of spreading hate speech must be corrected.”

Speaking to The Korea Times, an aide to Kim said the bill was partly prompted by a recent case involving Incheon middle school students who released a track filled with violent, hateful expressions toward peers, which then began circulating widely on music platforms and sparked public controversy.

Critics, however, see the idea as a revival of pre-release censorship that the country moved away from decades ago and a step back toward the kind of control exercised by authoritarian governments.

“You shouldn’t bring censorship back. Who sets the standards and who gets to decide? If a particular song is uncomfortable to listen to, isn’t it enough for that person to simply choose not to consume it?” rapper E SENS wrote on his social media.

A coalition of 11 cultural and art groups has also voiced similar concerns.

“The bill’s reference to ‘music that is likely to cause clear and serious harm to youth’ doesn’t provide any concrete criteria which would allow subjective judgments of what is harmful,” Culture and Arts Workers Solidarity said in a statement.

“The idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy. If this law’s underlying logic were correct, then discrimination and hatred should have disappeared under the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, when censorship was at its most powerful in modern Korean history.”

The group said the bill insults the history of resistance by artists who have fought fiercely against censorship and urged the ruling lawmakers to retract it.