South Korea was the first country in the world to implement an internet censorship law. There is a historical record of censorship, regardless of which administration—left or right—was in power.
That said, it’s a complicated issue because these censorship systems also tend to create state IT contracts and job opportunities.
To make things more concrete: most local bulletin board systems and forum platforms are heavily tied to a specific commercial CMS. This is not a coincidence — government-affiliated projects often mandate that CMS, and developers here, lacking both English proficiency and exposure to global open-source alternatives, end up locked into its ecosystem. As a result, even basic AI censorship features become dependent on that vendor’s proprietary modules. When a tight deadline (less than a month) forces a purchase, there’s no room to explore better, cheaper, or more transparent options. The structure itself perpetuates vendor lock-in, weak technical capacity, and a cycle of superficial compliance rather than genuine innovation.
Hopefully this mandate wouldn't end up being as far reaching as the SEED mandate did (forcing South Korean web to run on older Internet Explorer versions with custom insecure ActiveX controls for everything).
This smells of corruption.
I do think a proposal that AI-filters content on small forums is a bit weird, and probably clumsy. But Korea faces a real problem and usually leans toward a bias to action and "just do it". It leads to weird stuff but also to dynamic problem solving. The part I'm trying to preempt here is measuring this against so called "universal" values; these French Revolution/Enlightenment ideas of universal rights aren't really universal, they're one culture's logic, consistent inside its own bubble but exported like it's the default for everyone. I'll say, I do like them. But other self-consistent logics exist, and I think Korea's set is one of them. It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual. Both produce aberrations, only different ones.
For example, first time I came here I thought it's crazy to have so many speeding cameras and CCTVs everywhere. Years later I didn't so much "got used to it" but I think it's a tradeoff that mostly works and I grew to appreciate it.
Korea prefers lightweight polices (literally friendly looking) with a lot of automated, bulk enforcement, instead of sparse enforcement backed by the occasional armored truck. That's a design choice, not a slide into dystopia.
So all I'm trying to convey is, keep an open mind, and don't apply some supposed "universal" mindset blindly. Critique the mechanism all you want. Just don't do it by treating one culture's values as the yardstick everyone else gets measured by.
Fwiw I think it's a misfire. But I don't think it's a slippery-slide down dystopia. It's just Tuesday.
Of course, Korea's largest domestic community has had issues with filtering—things like terrorism threats and rape cases have occurred there. But that's because that community (DCinside) is so large. In reality, the incidents that have truly enraged the public started on Twitter (X) and Telegram. So do the key actors behind these problems end up being subject to censorship? No, they don't.
And does censorship actually eliminate the problems you mentioned? Or does it just make things darker and worse?
I myself have a typical East Asian mindset—I believe a certain level of restriction on freedom is necessary. But to be honest, I see this as internet martial law
There's almost no real opposition to stop these type of insane laws that violate individual freedoms. Expect more weirdness out of Korea
cf. https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024
Even if you consider that page biased in whatever way - it's still useful for comparisons on the same scale. E.g. https://www.politicalcompass.org/norway2025
[1]https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202502272123025
[2]https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereA...
You also have many right wingers (internationally) moving towards things like industrial policy, subsidies, and a populist labor focus (coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric of course). In some cases, even nationalization is under discussion. It’s a wild time to try and label things.
- Right-wing, conservative, authoritarian - society should be governed by elites, conflict should be resolved by submission to authority
- Left-wing, socialist, democratic - society should be governed by equal peers, conflict should be resolved by democratic consensus
- Liberal, individualist, pro-freedom - the question of societal governance (and the arising conflict) should be avoided if possible by giving each participant their own life independent on others
Of course it is confusing because people cheat and do not always want to state their aims clearly. The values are also not opposites, but independent; they can also be applied per problem. For example, most famously, some communists were both left (they wanted a socialist society without classes) and right (they wanted the transformation under the party authority). But each pair of these has a similar conflict like that, so (aside from the communist spectrum above) you get also capitalist spectrum between right vs liberal, and anarchist spectrum between left vs liberal. In the middle of all 3, things are roughly social-democratic.
A “I vouch for this person” system?
- For the longest time, you needed a windows computer to access any sort of government or banking service, and it's still the case for most services
- Because of the reliance on crappy windows laptops, you see everyone who uses a laptop carries an external mouse around to places like coffee shops (bc their trackpads suck)
- the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
- watching korean news is farcical - every time they cut to public footage, literally 80% of the frame is blurred. I see no point in even watching the news.
- APIs and API documentation for stuff is sooooo poorly designed/written. Like, it's a f-ing joke.
- External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
- You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything.
There are so many more examples but these are just the ones off the top of my head. There is not an inch of breathing room for dynamism.
Koreas issues arent political. This is what happens in pure oligopolies. People on twitter love to fantasize about Korea being so technofuturistic but the truth is that the startup culture is terrible, there's no venture capital scene, and the big companies write all the rules
Foreign internet content companies (like Twitch) got iced out a few years ago too due to “sending party pay” fees imposed by ISPs.
But the overall situation you described is basically a combination of a chaebol-centered, family-run system of national governance, layered on top of large corporate oligarchy. Within that structure, the problem becomes one of survival through vendor contracts rather than aggressive investment—that's the real issue.
I personally hate this culture, which is why I'm trying to get a job in the U.S. Working 84 hours a week for three months and making less than 8 million won is exhausting.
It's basically the same in many areas of the US. Social media use is very regional due to network effects.
What's hancom?
edit: for more context, it was initially adopted because it had better support for Korean language features, but now it serves basically no purpose other than be a pain in the ass for anyone who has to deal with their proprietary, incompatible with everything file formats.
Also, will the AI curtail artistic activity? Things it doesn't recognize? We had watchdogs on personal expression before, one of the outcomes was "degenerate art" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art]