Dong Hyun SongGoogle’s refusal to comply with the real name system together with the arrest of “Minerva,”
became a turning point in Korean cyberspace. When the government inspected the email
accounts of PD Note journalists, Gmail usage increased by 20 percent in June 2009 (Sisapress
July 2009). Many stakeholders thought that was a result of the Lee administration’s measures to
control the Internet, which was only applicable to Korean Internet service providers. As a conse-
quence the Korean Internet industry defined themselves as victims of the Lee administration’s
cyber governance owing to the decrease in their profits derived from unique visitors (UVs) and
PVs:^6 An official at a Korean web portal states that:
We are also a victim of Cyber Asylum Seeking. Last year Gmail was No.1 [in the
Korean market] in terms of time duration. What this signifies is that people who use
email, actively moved [away] from our company to Gmail. After the email account of
the writer of the TV programme P.D. Note was scrutinized by the government, our
email service usage rate dropped significantly. It is worrying ... If people leave, because
the quality of our service is bad, then we should be able to attract them back again by
upgrading our service. If not, something is wrong.
(Song 2012, 161)In fact, the Lee administration’s attempts to intervene in Korean cyberspace faced immense
difficulties due to the Internet’s rapidly changing environment. For instance, the mobile Inter-
net landed rather sensationally in Korean citizens’ daily lives when smartphones first appeared
in 2010. At that time, regulatory directives were not in place to control voices in social
media if they were located on an overseas-based service. The case demonstrates that in 2010,
national Internet regulation was predominantly based on tracking personal records provided
via Korean web portals. Without local powers to intervene, people adopted smartphones
together with social networking services (SNS), including Facebook and Twitter, as a political
tool against the Lee administration. People started to discuss SNS’s functionality in facilitat-
ing ‘pure’ voices and raised their hopes in terms of moving closer to an egalitarian and freer
society (Song 2012, 210).^7
As a case in point, it was widely perceived that as the local elections neared in 2010, the Lee
administration, including the ruling party, sought to restrict freedom of expression by suppress-
ing the use of SNS, particularly Twitter. The press also reported cases where Korean Twitter users
deleted their tweets after they received warnings from the National Election Commission and
the discussion relating to this was held on March 28, 2010 (Media Today 2010). It then became
a fashionable and tactical practice for ordinary people to upload their pictures proving that they
had voted against the Lee administration. Celebrities joined in, uploading photos to certify
they had voted and to encourage others to vote. In using a global web service, people used it to
express their freedom of speech and to work around the law.^8
However, it was not long before those in power began to appropriate the new mobile ter-
rain, which was ostensibly similar but also rather different from cyber typography. Politicians
and business enterprises started to use SNS as a tool for their own ends. Considering the new
platform strategically, business enterprises explored new markets to sell their products through
mobile advertisements. Politicians used SNS to refresh their image, and in relation to these
developments a shocking incident occurred during the 2013 presidential election. Two ex-cyber
command chiefs at the National Intelligence Service (NIS) were charged with ordering their
subordinates to spread “the posting of politically biased messages” on social media spaces in
order to help the victory of the incumbent President Park.^9 As a consequence, the myth of SNS
as a tool exclusively for political activism began to dissolve.