South Korea

On February 23, 2024, with less than two months to go before the parliamentary elections in April, the Republic of Korea’s presidential administration said it would respond strongly to the appearance of a fabricated video on the Internet “featuring” President Yoon Suk-yeol. “We express serious concern over the fact that … certain outlets are labeling the false and fabricated video as a satirical video or reporting on it as if it is okay because it is marked as fake.“…

As this text is being written, South Korea’s parliamentary elections are less than a month away. In this situation, both Democrats and Conservatives are engaged in a certain struggle for votes, and this struggle is largely reduced not so much to glorifying themselves, but to slinging mud at their opponents. At the same time, direct campaigning by officials is prohibited as the use of administrative resources, and under South Korea’s defamation laws, even the dissemination of truthful defamatory…

Preparations for the elections have reached the stage of determining the candidates who will represent a party in specific electoral districts. With factional infighting presenting a serious problem for both parties, this is an important point. First, the parties need to select candidates in such a way that “their” people are in the majority, and second, the selected candidates need to be nominated in the right electoral districts…