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After support for the Chinese men’s football team far exceeded that for the South Korean team on a cheering page on Korea’s Daum portal website during the quarterfinal match in the Hangzhou Asian Games on Sunday, Korea’s ruling People Power Party (PPP) announced that it would be vigorously pushing to amend legislation related to opinion-rigging on portal sites.

“This is a major incident that could lead to a repeat of the ‘Druking scandal’ in the general election, which is just six months away,” said Yoo Sang-beom, the senior spokesperson for the PPP, referring to a campaign to manipulate the comment section of another web portal in 2018.

The administration of Yoon Suk-yeol announced that it would organize a pan-governmental task force centered around the Korea Communications Commission. The government and ruling party, which were already calling for regulating web portals before the general election in April 2024, seem to be gearing up for another portal-bashing campaign.

“Daum is serving as a host for opinion-rigging. We may be seeing a return of the specter of public opinion manipulation in the upcoming parliamentary election,” said Kim Gi-hyeon, the head of the PPP.

“The groups that are behind this opinion-rigging need to be rooted out and harshly punished. We’ll make sure that a bill mandating that nationality be listed beside comments be passed in the next session of the National Assembly,” Kim added.

In January, Kim sponsored a revision to the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection that would require websites to display the nationality of commenters or the country from which they accessed the internet.

Park Seong-joong, the PPP’s ranking member on the National Assembly’s Science, ICT, Broadcasting and Communications Committee, addressed the issue in a press conference on Wednesday.

“Everyone is aware that certain anti-state forces are using domestic web portals to engage in sweeping public opinion manipulation. Forces aligned with the Democratic Party, North Korea and China are capable of manipulating public opinion according to their respective interests. Given the potential [for such groups] to weasel into the election process, we need to set up laws, institutions and systems to prevent that,” Park said.

The administration also moved quickly to take action. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo received a report in a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday from KCC Chairperson Lee Dong-kwan and ordered the swift formation of a pan-governmental task force to develop “countermeasures to prevent distortion and manipulation of public opinion.”

“Fake news is a serious societal disaster that undermines the foundations of democracy,” Han declared.

Based on an analysis of the 31.3 million support clicks on Daum around the time of the match, the KCC reported to Han that only 3,592 IP addresses were actually accessing the service, with “approximately 50% of comments posted via the Netherlands and 30% by way of Japan.”

The KCC believes that users outside of South Korea mass-produced comments in support of China through methods such as the use of virtual private networks (VPN) to masquerade as South Korean users and the employment of macros to manipulate comments.

Kakao, which operates Daum, issued a press release stating that it had asked police to investigate.

“Two internet protocols appear to have used macro programs to mass-produce clicks, which is a serious obstruction of operations that is damaging to the aims of the service,” the statement said.

At the same time, Kakao also explained that the situation stemmed from the nature of the service as one that can be used without logging in, allowing for unlimited numbers of clicks.

Daum said this explained similar situations that occurred with a World Cup tune-up match between South Korea and Cameroon in September 2022 and another match between South Korea and Kyrgyzstan on Sept. 28, where fewer than 20% of users supported South Korea and over 80% backed the opposing team.

“It’s frustrating to see people making a political issue out of something that’s basically like a part of game culture,” an industry official sighed.

Kim Borami, an attorney specializing in media-related issues, said, “This is a situation where they’re adopting a partisan approach to everything and putting pressure on digital businesses without any judicial process in order to block off criticisms of the government, with the result that portal sites end up having to bow down, like Naver suspending its fact-checking service.”

Min Kyung-bae, a professor of media video promotion at Kyung Hee Cyber University, stressed, “This is a case where the precise circumstances and background have yet to be fully established.”

“This can only be seen as an attempt by the administration to use the situation as an excuse to control portal sites ahead of [next year’s] general election,” he concluded.

By Sun Dam-eun, staff reporter; Lim Ji-sun, staff reporter; Choi Sung-jin, staff reporter

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