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Online censorship for president only benefits foreign firms

Online censorship for president only benefits foreign firms

Posted October. 04, 2014 04:12,   

한국어

After the prosecution announced "stern punishment for online defamation acts," cyber asylum seekers are surging in number. As concerns widely spread that prosecutors could wiretap conversations between individuals, many have migrated from the domestic Internet messenger Kakao Talk to overseas service such as Russia’s Telegram. The number of Telegram users have surged more than 10 folds from 20,000 to 250,000 in a matter of a week. At last, Daum Kakao announced, “We will reduce the duration of dialogue storage from five-seven days to two-three days.”

This situation started after President Park Geun-hye said on Sept. 16, “Slanderous remarks against the president have gone too far.” Two days later, the prosecution announced a plan "to sternly deal with cases of spreading false information on cyber space,” and formed an exclusive investigation team. As netizens started cyber asylum-seeking en masse, prosecutors attempted to contain impact, saying “Private space such as messengers is not subject to crackdown.” However, as police are found to have raided and searched a Kakao Talk account of Jeong Jin-woo, vice chairman of the Labor Party, netizens are engaged in "cyber migration" en masse again.

It is true that verbal abuse and defamation on the Internet is so serious that people with sound common sense can hardly endure and accept. However, it is a shameful thing that the prosecution immediately steps in to respond to the president’s remarks and ends up causing controversy over infringement of freedom of expression and privacy in a free democratic country. Kakao Talk has 150 million users and carries 6 billion messages daily. It is impossible to monitor these messages one by one, and people who don’t violate rules have no reason to worry about raid and search. Despite this, even ordinary netizens are rushing to escape from domestic online messenger service to overseas services due to the public’s distrust in the prosecution and the government.

Telegram is a Russian-made messenger service, whose servers are situated in Germany. Telegram offers high security because dialogue messages are "automatically exploded" after a certain period of time, and the users do not need to worry about raid and search since its servers are situated overseas. Telegram is popular mostly in countries where press freedom index is poor. These include South Korea, Uzbekistan, Brunei, and Malaysia. Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled the real-name Internet user identification system unconstitutional in a unanimous vote in 2012. The reason was that even though the purpose of the system, which is to block malign comments and groundless rumors, is justifiable, freedom of press should not be infringed upon nonetheless. Prosecutors’ excessive efforts to serve the president is putting Korean companies in jeopardy and only benefiting foreign players.