Social Media Manipulation in South Korea

Similar to countries around the world, South Korea finds its political system vulnerable to online manipulation of social media from domestic and foreign sources.

According to a study by the University of Oxford, social media manipulation for political purposes is becoming increasingly common. Signs of efforts to use social media to manipulate public opinion date back to at least the 2010 midterm elections in the United States, and soon thereafter began in South Korea as the National Intelligence Service (NIS) sought to shape public opinion in advance of elections in 2011 and 2012.  

The Oxford study documents 48 countries where there are active campaigns to manipulate public opinion on social media in 2017, up from 28 countries in 2016. While social media manipulation is often driven by efforts to spread disinformation for electoral purposes, the spread of fake news and foreign interference is also driving government agencies to begin to manipulate social media to counter these effects.

Efforts at social media manipulation are especially appealing in South Korea as 84 percent of Koreans use online sources for news, in contrast to only 25 percent who use print publications as a news source.

Previous efforts by the NIS and more recent attempts at manipulation tend to fall into a category known as “political astroturfing.” Political astroturfing is the attempt to hide the source of a message on social media to make it appear as though it originated from grassroots activity. The goal is to shift public opinion on issues in public discourse, such as North Korea, or impact the support for certain political candidates.

Examples of astroturfing versus genuine grassroots enthusiasm can be seen in the real world as well. In 2008, McDonald’s paid 1,000 part-time employees to line up outside one of its stores in Osaka for the launch of its quarter pounder in Japan to create the impression of popular demand for the hamburger. This contrasts with real grassroots support for products such as the iPhone, where enthusiastic fans have been known sleep in front of the store overnight to get the next version.

The effort is the same in politics, to shape the public perception of a policy or politician. In South Korea, the NIS ran an operation of political astroturfing to help conservative candidates in 2011 National Assembly bi-elections and the 2012 National Assembly elections, as well as an effort to ensure that then-South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was succeeded by a conservative candidate in the 2012 presidential elections.

A government investigation into the activities of the NIS in 2012 indicates that it had over 1,000 Twitter accounts, but an outside analysis of those accounts suggests that only around 120 accounts were responsible for 132,154 tweets actively engaged in trying to shape public opinion in the election. The remainder of the accounts most likely were focused on shaping opinion on policy issues such as North Korea. Among those engaged in the campaign, the accounts seem to have been divided to conduct three separate tasks – spread relevant news articles, amplify messages from sympathetic accounts or other NIS accounts, and to attack non-conservatives.

However, the NIS wasn’t the only domestic source of social media manipulation that has come to light from the 2012 elections. In 2013, it became public that the Ministry of National Defense’s cyberwarfare command had posted 15,000 messages that violated political neutrality, including 2,100 that attacked Park Geun-hye’s opponents. For a period, the cyberwarfare command also ran a news agency, Point News.

The Ministry of National Defense’s internal intelligence agency also operated its own social media operation, which saw 470 members of the Defense Security Command create accounts under the identities of relatives to smear liberal politicians.

Government agencies were not alone in their efforts. There is also evidence to suggest that the Saenuri Party and the Minjoo Party were also using automated systems to shape public opinion on social media, if on a lesser scale that the NIS.

The most recent attempt at political astroturfing in South Korea is the Druking scandal, named for the pseudonym of the political blogger Kim Dong-won, who oversaw a team of bloggers that sought to manipulate public opinion.

In the 2017 presidential campaign, Druking used a macro program and a team of bloggers to generate online comments and amplify the likes of comments favorable to then-candidate Moon Jae-in on the dominant Korean web portal Naver.

However, Druking seems to have turned on the Moon administration when his request for a colleague to receive a government job was rebuffed. He then began working to promote comments against Moon’s decision to have a joint women’s hockey team with North Korea during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. In the case of the inter-Korean hockey team, Druking was found to have used at least 614 portal IDs.

Complicating the scandal for Moon’s Minjoo Party, South Gyeongsang Governor Kim Kyoung-soo, a close confidant of President Moon, was convicted for his role in coordinating the 2017 effort. Druking was also convicted of manipulating public opinion on social media, though investigators have found no link to Moon in the scandal.

The use of Naver was particularly important in the Druking scandal as 65 percent of Koreans get their news online from Naver, according to a Reuters Institute-Oxford University poll.

However, the NIS and Druking scandals aren’t the only efforts to try to manipulate public opinion in South Korea through social media. In 2011, North Korea began taking a subtle approach. Knowing that new profiles with little history on South Korean social media might be suspicious, the North Koreans used stolen South Korean identities to front their efforts. Also, rather than using North Korean propaganda that would easily be spotted, the North focused its 41,373 posts over a two-year period on areas of debate in South Korea, such as whether there should be access to North Korean websites.

While the reported efforts at manipulation declined during the 2017 presidential election, the social media scandals may be taking a toll. According to the Reuters-Oxford poll, only 25 percent of South Koreans trust media overall and only 19 percent trust social media. Sixty percent of South Koreans also have concerns about poor journalism and fake news, and more than 70 percent believe that the government, media, and internet platforms should do more to separate real content from fake content.

Naver has taken steps to ban the automated software that aided Druking in manipulating comments on its site, while the Korean Communications Commission and other government agencies are working to make the use of fake accounts illegal. However, there are concerns that calls to push fake news offline could be used as a tool to censor legitimate speech.

It’s unclear what impact these efforts will have. A study of cyber-rumors on national security issues in South Korea found that government surveillance of false information on the internet tended to result in an increase in trust of cyber-rumors, at least on national security issues. This creates a dilemma for policy makers. There is a need to address the spread of false information on social media, but at the same time those efforts might make false information more believable.

Despite government efforts, we shouldn’t expect astroturfing in South Korea to disappear anytime soon. In 2012’s presidential election, Park Geun-hye defeated Moon Jae-in by around 2.5 percentage points. In tight elections, there will be a strong incentive to try to sway political opinion as a few percentage points could shift the result. Until that incentive is removed from the system, expect different parties to continue to try to manipulate public opinion through social media in South Korea.