hankyoreh

In response to the Chinese team receiving more support clicks than 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) has dubbed the incident a second “Druking scandal” and set up a pan-governmental task force, pushing a narrative that this was a case of opinion-rigging.

However, as this case bears little resemblance to the opinion-rigging scandal that made headlines in 2018, the ruling party’s reaction has been criticized as an overreach aimed at clamping down on portal sites, important platforms for news consumption in Korea, ahead of next year’s general election.

There are two major differences between this recent click-to-cheer incident on Daum and the opinion-rigging carried out by a blogger under the alias Druking, which was carried out in comment sections so as to rig public opinion ahead of the 2017 presidential election.

First, the Druking case took place in the context of the portal site Naver’s login-based commenting service. The system was designed to allow only one opinion to be expressed per ID, so the fact that a single person used multiple IDs for the appearance of representing the opinions of multiple people lends credence to the view that the behavior interference in the business of the portal site.

The court of first instance determined that “the user interfered with the portal’s business by sending false signals or fraudulent orders as if the user had actually clicked like or dislike on the comments of the news article.” The court also found that this act caused damage to Naver by reducing users’ trust in the portal, and this verdict was confirmed by the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, the feature on the Daum portal’s sports page that allows viewers to click a button to cheer on a team does not require users to log in. A person can click multiple times and cheer on both teams at the same time. The feature was designed to be a fun way to express support while watching a sporting event, not a sophisticated reflection of public opinion.

An insider with 20 years of experience in online service planning told the Hankyoreh that the type of click-to-cheer features that appear on Daum are “planned as means of entertainment, and require no login as to encourage participation.”

“If we were talking about services like comments on news articles and online polls, which could be considered indicators of online public opinion, it’d be right to criticize them for being designed this way, but this instance seems like something different,” they went on.

Another difference in the cases is that the click-to-cheer feature doesn’t constitute a public forum where public opinion is formed. In the Druking case, the court viewed the comment sections on news articles as constituting a public square in that they “have the function of shaping online public opinion through transparent disclosure of information and free discussion,” but a click-to-cheer feature is unlikely to be interpreted as such a function.

For this reason, many argue that there’s no basis for interference charges. A police officer who was part of the team that investigated the Druking case commented, “Since there was a limit on the number of comments that could be made per ID, the very process of marshaling other IDs was deemed [proof of] intent to interfere in business,” in reference to the case on Naver.

“But this time around the intention from the get-go was to get [users] to visit the site often and click away multiple times, so it needs to be considered in a different light,” they said.

Regarding the use of macros that allowed for multiple clicks on the click-to-cheer feature, attorney Lee Ok-hyeong said, “If the portal was taking technical measures to prevent the use macros, but individuals were able to bypass them and use macros anyway, it could be considered interference. However, it seems somewhat unreasonable to call it illegal to use macros [if no such preventative measure were in place].”

While the ruling party has gone so far as to claim Chinese and North Korean involvement, it’s not uncommon for the team Korea is playing to have more clicks cheering them on. There have been plenty of cases in which viewers, unhappy with how the Korean team is playing, cheer their opponent on instead.

In fact, September’s South Korea-Saudi Arabia friendly football match and the round of 16 men’s football match between South Korea and Kyrgyzstan at the Asian Games saw only 48% and 15% of users supporting the Korean team, respectively.

During the South Korea-Cameroon friendly in September 2022, support for the Cameroonian team exceeded 80% at one point.

The ruling party is countering that it’s only taking measures in order to check for weak spots in the system since it’s “been confirmed that it’s possible to rig public opinion on large portal sites so that it differs greatly from actual public opinion.” But in the wake of the Druking incident, many portal sites implemented anti-manipulation measures for comment sections on news articles, which are considered online public forums.

Daum has eliminated the comment sections on articles and replaced them with real-time chat windows (called “time talks”) that disappear 24 hours after the article is published. Naver limits users to 20 comments on articles per 24 hours, and the ability to like or dislike comments is also time-limited. These systems make manipulation tactics using macros impossible.

“The ruling party is threatening [portal sites] even though no actual harm was done to society in this case. I see it as a continuation of the recent raids on media organizations,” remarked Son Ji-won, a lawyer at Open Net, an information rights organization. “This can only be seen as politically motivated in the run-up to the general election.”

By Kim Ga-yoon, staff reporter; Jang Na-rye, staff reporter

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