NAVER, the biggest online portal of South Korea, might be getting its comments manipulated by China. On December 21, a security research team released numerical evidence supporting their claim.
| navercorp.com
The team, led by Yoon Min Woo, a professor at the Department of Police and Security at Gachon University, disclosed they had captured numerous suspicious movements that hint at organized comment activities by China. The team used big data analysis of NAVER’s news comments using the web crawling method. They analyzed the comments made between September and November under articles related to China and diplomacy.
Professor Yoon Min Woo | gachon.ac.kr
The team was able to identify over 50 accounts that posted comments suspected to be related to China’s mass influence operations. Some of the common characteristics of those accounts include using Chinese transliteration, consistently misspelled words, and mixing Chinese characters in the comments. A lot of these accounts also follow each other in order to boost their cyberspace influence.
The network of Chinese commenters on NAVER | NAVER News
The content of the comments also followed a pattern. According to the researchers, most of the comments focused on portraying China as superior or making derogatory comments about South Korea. A lot of them were also provocative in nature, trying to fuel regional, generational, or gender conflicts. For example, comments like, “Gyeongbokgung Palace belongs to Chinese culture,” “Korean women eat like pigs and never exercise,” and “People in Jeju now speak in Seoul dialect and have become more civilized. But Gyeongsang-do and Jeolla-do people still speak in strange dialects and are uncivilized,” were frequently seen under relevant articles.
Some of the comments highlighted in the report read, “6.25 was not a war between the North and the South. It was a war between Japan and Korea,” and “Korean women just eat like pigs” | NAVER News
Between September 2023 and November 2023, it is estimated that at least 30,000 comments were made by the Chinese account network. It is presumed that this is a covert cyber operation to manipulate domestic public opinion. The National Intelligence Service of South Korea is also reportedly aware of the situation and is closely monitoring it.
The research team, however, mentioned that it is difficult for them to determine if this network of accounts is directly associated with the Chinese public or security authorities. Since the companies have not cooperated with providing access to certain data, it is challenging to trace these accounts for the researchers, despite the help of the police. But given the pattern in the content, the organized manner in which these accounts have created a network and the language, it is difficult to consider these comments as voluntarily written by regular people.
