Social media and popular activism in a Korean contextplace in April 2009 with the arrest of journalists from the public television station MBC’s inves-
tigative program, PD Note, which first reported on the danger of U.S. beef and the Lee adminis-
tration’s response. Prosecutors scrutinized their email accounts after receiving detailed data from
the Korean web portal Daum.net (Kim JW June 2009).
Fears about the Lee administration’s cyber control amplified upon trickling down to small
online communities. One example of note is Clien.net, a renowned online community that
focused on general interest topics and IT information. The manager of Clien.net announced that
the community had decided to close their section related to political issues on June 28, 2009.
The administrator stated that:
We are closing the bulletin board of current state of affairs due to the current social
unrest.
(Clien.net Admin, June 2009)Ultimately, the government’s cyber control resulted in Korean online users’ cyber migration to
global web service providers. This course of action—or “cyber asylum seeking”—seemed the
only way for users to thwart the states ceaseless scrutiny into their personal data.
Cyber migration of Korean online users to a global platform
“Cyber asylum seeker” refers to an individual Korean Internet user who has migrated from local
web portals to global corporations, refusing to comply with the restrictions that the Korean
government policies have placed on the local Internet. The concept emerged during and after
Candlelight 2008 when Korean online users felt that the Lee administration oppressed Korean
cyberspace by deleting their posts and arresting government protestors (Song 12/2012, 44). The
cyber asylum seekers’ mission can be understood as a response to these notices, as users started
to leave Korean web portals because they felt pressure from the state as well as the web portals
themselves. Korean political and cultural specificity as well as related online activism affected
how global business and culture shaped and influenced Korean social media. The best example
is the manner in which global Internet service providers settled into the Korean social media
market after Candlelight 2008. The once impregnable Korean Internet market began eroding
in 2009 as a result of the emergence of smartphone usage in Korean society, and the reaction
to the Lee administration’s state-centric cyber governance. These online users reacted to the
Lee administration’s attempts to impose boundaries on online discussion, and in transitioning
to already functioning global institutions had a greater influence in expanding Korean cyber-
space. For instance, the additional limitations of domestic Internet regulations were revealed
when Google refused to comply with the restrictions imposed by the Lee administration. On
YouTube, when the default setting is “Korea,” a notice appears claiming “We have voluntarily
disabled this functionality on kr.youtube.com because of the Korean real-name verification law”
denoting that the uploading of images and replies are restricted (see Figure 9a.2).^5
Figure 9a.2 The original home page of YouTube Korea (kr.youtube.com)