alt Hacker NewsSomething missing as cultural context is that deepfake, involuntary "porn", and all sorts of abuse of personal image, are a rampant and omnipresent problem in Korea. Many things are great here, but the sexual landscape when it comes to men versus women and kids, is nasty. You can't really apply a Western mindset to this without understanding just how messed up some of that stuff is. So whatever you think of the mechanism, the problem behind it is very real.
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.
Replies
I often agree with you to some extent. In Korea, you can't just say there's no problem with revenge porn—that's basically the logic the Korean government uses. But the issue is that the main source of revenge porn actually comes from overseas communities that Koreans use.
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
I don't think it's a dystopia. Hanlon's razor still applies. But I beg to differ on your classification of North Korean policies as "lightweight". Korean internet policies usually mandate a very specific technology (like SEED, or apparently this new model now) and weave a web of highly-detailed, Korea-specific regulations that end up creating a monopoly or oligopoly of objectively inferior and highly insecure software.
This is not lightweight. Even the much maligned Online Safety Act in the UK that forced age verification is a far more lightweight policy than what Korea does. It doesn't mandate a specific software or hardware, it doesn't mandate a specific cipher or protocol. Even the list of methods acceptable methods for age verification is explicitly non-exhaustive[1]. And this is the current poster-child of government overreach in the west!
My example of extremely lightweight digital policies (for most things) would be Japan. Vague requirements, non-exhaustive examples, copious exceptions ("you don't have to implement X if it's technologically cumbersome"), everything can be done either manually or in a fully automated way. Is this good? I think Japan is sometimes far too lenient (e.g. on security requirements), but objectively speaking this is lightweight. Korean digital policy is not lightweight by any definition of that word. If not sending tanks to catch every revenge porn distributor is "lightweight" for you that's fine, but which country does that? If we judge a heavyweight policy by its restrictiveness, then there are probably only a handful countries that can compete with Korea.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...