The problem is that using an AI censorship tool requires purchasing a solution from a specific vendor. And the deadline is effectively less than a month. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this—South Korea especially has many IT zombie companies that sustain themselves through government contracts. In practice, there’s a local CMS structure in place, and Korean programmers, who are generally weak in English, have to rely on that local CMS, which makes them weak in programming as well. (This is why, despite being a country with a high proportion of highly educated people, South Korea has relatively few prominent programmers.)
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.
This sounds to me like a repeat of what happened with SEED[1]. The recipe is the same: a real problem followed by a hasty (and probably inferior) NIH solution, a single implementation forced down everybody's throats followed by years of technological stagnation.
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).
My country is always like this. I think it's a problem unique to East Asian countries—following orders obediently. I read the link you shared, and it seems similar.
It's essentially a takedown of Korean imageboards and forums where political memes, especially of the current president, is very popular.
They are fully aware that these operators will not be able to afford the hardware and sustain their public squares by requiring a ridiculous ordinance targeting them.
I see GP is downplaying this very fact that its the "norm" in Korea and I can tell you that it's not. Korea has enjoyed free expression through the internet, now posting meme of the Korean president is going to be impossible/illegal for the site operator. This is definitely not normal and the AI narrative is just a convenient excuse.
Korea's tax revenue has increased thanks to the AI boom, so the country is actively promoting AI at the national level, creating pressure that you have to use it or else, and continuously announcing projects with 'AI' attached to them. The problem is that a freelance individual like me has no way to get involved—it's almost entirely a business based on personal connections. Personally, I think if this is successfully operated in Korea down the line, it could be exported to other countries
You're right about the CMS. But unlike the Western ecosystem centered around WordPress, South Korea's public and web ecosystem is pathologically dependent on isolated local bulletin board system (BBS)-centric CMS platforms like 'GnuBoard' or 'ZeroBoard/XE.' As a result, when the government mandates censorship modules, it creates vendor lock-in, as those modules are supplied exclusively in the form of plugins for these local CMS platforms
> 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.
South Korea has spent a large portion of its history under military dictatorships (yes, South Korea) and while the last generation or so has known democracy, its been shakey. This this kind of national background, when liberties are abridged it probably doesn't seem like a huge departure from the norm.
Something 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.
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.
I wrote "lightweight polices" not policies. The police presents itself as benign looking in a public context. Enforcement of day to day offences is done mechanically by machines. A state trooper doesn't stop you on a speed check with his hand on his gun.
Yes, online policies are wild and not lightweight at all.
It's very similar to age verification where there's a genuinely horrible problem that we're getting a terrible solution to by people who seemingly don't understand the internet. And the finger on the monkey's paw curls.
Compare and contrast "Saudi extremist holed up in Pakistan who has been targeting Americans for a decade succeeds in blowing up three buildings with large planes on American soil: Well, I guess it's time to invade Iraq and Afghanistan then" 8I
> It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual.
I associate "harmony" with voluntary cooperation and joy, not machines preemptively gagging people. A good exercise is to imagine what this would look like transplanted into non-tech terms: it is illegal to operate a bar, restaurant, book shop, art studio, or even to gather in medium-to-large groups of people, without a government assigned censor empowered to listen in and silence people.
You are thinking in Western terms. In East Asian Confucian societies, "harmony" means following the rules to keep the social hierarchy in place. Staying quiet and not disrupting the status quo is more important than your sense of personal freedom.
From our Western point of view, it is very much not voluntary and joyful.
The production and sale of pornography are illegal in South Korea. The South Korean government also strictly blocks access to pornography distributed from overseas. ISPs have implemented a DPI system similar to China’s to ensure internet censorship and blocking. Ultimately, the production and sharing of amateur pornography in South Korea is effectively being driven by the government, regardless of South Koreans’ moral standards.
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
No traditional media talk about this as much as it should be. No one seems to care but the always-angry, chronically online. I had no high hopes for free internet in this country but it's getting worse than I've ever imagined.
They are fully aware that website operators of popular discussion forums cannot afford it. This is effectively a mass censorship/takedown of Korea's remaining corners of free speech.
Imagine if a subreddit had to shut down because they have to now purchase expensive hardware just to vet each image shared.
These forums are popular with the young who share meme images of the current president of Korea and this new ordinance would immediately put an end to that.
That's pretty much the present today. Tbh I'm fine with the public internet just dying off at this point and people going back to their local smaller scale groups.
I'd prefer the 2011/2012 era before mass moderation was possible and before people began policing for "toxicity". We still had the culture and vestiges of freedom of the old web, alongside with the network effect of millions of "normal" people joining in the conversation through their iphones
lobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.
no, its public federated social media running on at protocol. no big tech control, no crypto bullshit like nostr, no way for bad admins to delete your posts like mastodon (they can only ban you from their own server). you can build a web of trust or vetting system on top of that like what tangled is doing for code.
Looks like South Korea is taking a page out of its northern neighbour's book.
Will this impact software exported out of Korea? I can't imagine Samsung will gain any popularity if their phones come prepackaged with AI censorship tools. It massively backfired when Apple planned to do it on iPhones.
Korea is backwards in technology in every possible way.
- 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
You're right. This stems from the characteristics of a small country. In fact, in Korea, Twitter (X) is looked down upon as something only crazy people use, and its image is not good.
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.
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.
I agree with some of them. Others need much more nuance.
> - External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
This was a positive for literally every Korean resident and only a negative for Google shareholders and a few tourists who had to download a local maps app. Boohoo, politicians doing things benefiting their people.
> - You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything.
The reality is that this also has many upsides. Admitting this doesn't do well on HN though. The truth is that it's a defensible tradeoff, you can disagree with it but pretending it's clear-cut is ignorant.
> - the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
In 2026 nobody uses these except for when dealing with government institutions. Saying they're de facto for Korea as a whole is wild generalization.
It’s just funny that I get to know about this sort of Korean policies in HN not from main media (I live in Korea).
I had a few chances to apply for government grants in a startup. There is a lot of blind money for new techs but people managing it are simply not competent enough to understand them. Also, like some comments mentioned, tech infra around their management system is often old and very insecure.
Huh, their internet forums look like Hacker News or such old-time sites rather than modern apps like Reddit or something. In terms of UI UX and use of web tech. Surprised these have like 20% population of country as visitors.
I wonder if it’s their language that made them stick with older forum style rather than English speaking world’s apps?
Minority Report wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual ffs.
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]
No they didn’t, quite the opposite, they were the main customers and and certainly accelerated the spread of the technology. Of course banning the printing of specific books is another matter.
Islamic countries OTOH handle banned or strictly restricted its use. Coincidentally most progress there ceased and they were stuck in the 1500s for the next 400 years or so..
Actually it's perfect. How long did it take rulers to go from fighting the printing press to using it for propaganda and their own ambitions? The internet has just speed run that same course.
How many people are involved in ISPs, data centers, and other internet backbones? Most people are consumers rather than producers or "printing press" operators.
Guy is all over this post commenting nonsense because he's in love with the party that instated martial law recently and tried to do a coup. You're wasting your time on him.
You're completely right that the Korean blues are anything but left. Not even just compared to Corbyn, even compared to European labor parties (the champagne "social democrats" in each country). Biden was more left-wing than the Korean blues. That tells you everything.
In many ways the Korean blues are more nationalist than the reds, which can't be said about basically any modern relevant left-wing party elsewhere. Another good indicator they're absolutely not left-wing.
he is objectively left wing. People are over indexing on his controversies instead of looking at his policy platform as a whole. Also take into account that he is in a democracy the leans right on many un-impactful but hot topic issues.
If the implication is that the left is more willing to violate freedoms, you're leaving out that the right-wing president was ousted for attempting to subvert democracy by instituting martial law for no good reason.
Sure buddy, just omit the fact that the last president tried to do a coup and is now serving a long prison sentence. It's all the fault of the left leaning guy, there was no censorship or state surveillance in Korea before that.
I’m Korean too, but people forget that the right wing has also enforced censorship. Personally, I think the Korean right wing cries out for freedom, but in reality their ideology is rooted in the anti-communist thought of the anti-communist liberal era. I myself have somewhat negative feelings toward communism, but the so-called 'right-wing' regime in Korea is really just nostalgia for dictatorship. The current Korean administration is called 'left-wing' only because the opposition is far-right. In fact, the Korean Political History Association has long classified the 'Democratic Party'(Party name) administration as conservative. This is simply due to a poor understanding of politics[1],[2]
Not familiar with Korean politics, but both left and right are immensely pro-censorship here in America. For the most part, the only thing that's saving us (at least so far) is that they can't agree on what to censor.
I don’t think this framing works nor is your attitude of "I'm korean I automatically know more than a foreigner who studied Korean history". It is true that Korean conservatives have used censorship and authoritarian language before such as Yoon’s 2024 martial-law attempt is the obvious recent example, and nobody serious should minimize that but that does not make the Democratic Party some neutral actor, or make censorship a uniquely partisan problem. The current ruling party's previous president, Moon Jae-in’s gov, passed laws specifically suppressing anti-North Korea leaflet and threatened activists against sending them into North Korea which the Constitutional Court later struck it down as an excessive restriction on free speech. That is a clear sign of suppressing free speech at home to directly appease an authoritarian country!
Same with media regulation in 2021, the same party tht is in power now pushed laws that directly supressed press freedom, prompting strong condemnation from Reporters without Borders and international human rights group. And lo behold you have laws now extend beyond simply press to free speech on the internet exactly as they had warned 5 years ago.
The trend of suppressing free speech continues under current admin where lawmakers passed another false-information bill allowing up to 5x damages against news orgs and independent journalist's YouTube channels, where there is no bipartisan oversight in arbitration and it is heavily in control by the ruling "democratic party".
The Korean Democratic Party is not Marxist, but seemingly have shown affinity for them from failed sunshine policy that directly enabled the development of nuclear weapons and human rights abuses with North Korea, pushing more state intervention/lawfare than any other party in history. Korean ideology does not map cleanly onto US/Europe labels and attempt to smearing conservatives to gatekeep the true political reality of Sout hKorea and its history is simply immature.
He's a twonk and Britain is essentially a police state at this point. The American Revolutionary War was fought over far less than what is going on right now.
Traditional labels are becoming useless anyway, liberal can mean anything from libertarian free market enjoyer to radical progressive depending on who you are talking to. And I am talking about self-identified labels!
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.
The problem is that using an AI censorship tool requires purchasing a solution from a specific vendor. And the deadline is effectively less than a month. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this—South Korea especially has many IT zombie companies that sustain themselves through government contracts. In practice, there’s a local CMS structure in place, and Korean programmers, who are generally weak in English, have to rely on that local CMS, which makes them weak in programming as well. (This is why, despite being a country with a high proportion of highly educated people, South Korea has relatively few prominent programmers.)
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.
This sounds to me like a repeat of what happened with SEED[1]. The recipe is the same: a real problem followed by a hasty (and probably inferior) NIH solution, a single implementation forced down everybody's throats followed by years of technological stagnation.
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).
[1] https://archive.is/ermII
My country is always like this. I think it's a problem unique to East Asian countries—following orders obediently. I read the link you shared, and it seems similar.
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>The problem is that using an AI censorship tool requires purchasing a solution from a specific vendor.
This smells of corruption.
It's essentially a takedown of Korean imageboards and forums where political memes, especially of the current president, is very popular.
They are fully aware that these operators will not be able to afford the hardware and sustain their public squares by requiring a ridiculous ordinance targeting them.
I see GP is downplaying this very fact that its the "norm" in Korea and I can tell you that it's not. Korea has enjoyed free expression through the internet, now posting meme of the Korean president is going to be impossible/illegal for the site operator. This is definitely not normal and the AI narrative is just a convenient excuse.
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Korea's tax revenue has increased thanks to the AI boom, so the country is actively promoting AI at the national level, creating pressure that you have to use it or else, and continuously announcing projects with 'AI' attached to them. The problem is that a freelance individual like me has no way to get involved—it's almost entirely a business based on personal connections. Personally, I think if this is successfully operated in Korea down the line, it could be exported to other countries
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CMS here not referring to content management system?
You're right about the CMS. But unlike the Western ecosystem centered around WordPress, South Korea's public and web ecosystem is pathologically dependent on isolated local bulletin board system (BBS)-centric CMS platforms like 'GnuBoard' or 'ZeroBoard/XE.' As a result, when the government mandates censorship modules, it creates vendor lock-in, as those modules are supplied exclusively in the form of plugins for these local CMS platforms
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You're right. I need to explain that the bulletin board systems and forum systems are built primarily around a specific CMS. Sorry about that.
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The problem is that it's a fundamentally stupid idea
> 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.
South Korea has spent a large portion of its history under military dictatorships (yes, South Korea) and while the last generation or so has known democracy, its been shakey. This this kind of national background, when liberties are abridged it probably doesn't seem like a huge departure from the norm.
Something 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.
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...
I wrote "lightweight polices" not policies. The police presents itself as benign looking in a public context. Enforcement of day to day offences is done mechanically by machines. A state trooper doesn't stop you on a speed check with his hand on his gun.
Yes, online policies are wild and not lightweight at all.
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The scale of deepfakes in Korea is horrifying: https://www.securityhero.io/state-of-deepfakes/#targeted-ind....
And in 2024, someone made a viral map with reports of deepfakes in schools: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20240830/dee....
It's very similar to age verification where there's a genuinely horrible problem that we're getting a terrible solution to by people who seemingly don't understand the internet. And the finger on the monkey's paw curls.
Compare and contrast "Saudi extremist holed up in Pakistan who has been targeting Americans for a decade succeeds in blowing up three buildings with large planes on American soil: Well, I guess it's time to invade Iraq and Afghanistan then" 8I
> It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual.
I associate "harmony" with voluntary cooperation and joy, not machines preemptively gagging people. A good exercise is to imagine what this would look like transplanted into non-tech terms: it is illegal to operate a bar, restaurant, book shop, art studio, or even to gather in medium-to-large groups of people, without a government assigned censor empowered to listen in and silence people.
Does that still look "harmonious"?
You are thinking in Western terms. In East Asian Confucian societies, "harmony" means following the rules to keep the social hierarchy in place. Staying quiet and not disrupting the status quo is more important than your sense of personal freedom.
From our Western point of view, it is very much not voluntary and joyful.
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The production and sale of pornography are illegal in South Korea. The South Korean government also strictly blocks access to pornography distributed from overseas. ISPs have implemented a DPI system similar to China’s to ensure internet censorship and blocking. Ultimately, the production and sharing of amateur pornography in South Korea is effectively being driven by the government, regardless of South Koreans’ moral standards.
Could you elaborate on the DPI? Are VPN's banned or only specific VPN traffic.
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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
No traditional media talk about this as much as it should be. No one seems to care but the always-angry, chronically online. I had no high hopes for free internet in this country but it's getting worse than I've ever imagined.
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Korea has a very large femcel crowd and this will impact their misandric expressions as well.
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Forcing CUDA and guiding for Ubuntu 18.04 (FYI, EOS was 2023). Do they really think single Quadro GPU server can handle heavy traffics in real-time?
It’s insane to mandate the specific vendor used. This reads like a backroom deal was reached. Or gross incompetence.
South Korea has history, for years their banking applications required ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...
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They are fully aware that website operators of popular discussion forums cannot afford it. This is effectively a mass censorship/takedown of Korea's remaining corners of free speech.
Imagine if a subreddit had to shut down because they have to now purchase expensive hardware just to vet each image shared.
These forums are popular with the young who share meme images of the current president of Korea and this new ordinance would immediately put an end to that.
Gross not giving a damn
The future is self hosted private invite only communities of vetted real life humans, likely done in person.
That's pretty much the present today. Tbh I'm fine with the public internet just dying off at this point and people going back to their local smaller scale groups.
I'd prefer the 2011/2012 era before mass moderation was possible and before people began policing for "toxicity". We still had the culture and vestiges of freedom of the old web, alongside with the network effect of millions of "normal" people joining in the conversation through their iphones
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And when you need longer reach than that?
A “I vouch for this person” system?
That has largely worked for private trackers.
lobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.
no, its public federated social media running on at protocol. no big tech control, no crypto bullshit like nostr, no way for bad admins to delete your posts like mastodon (they can only ban you from their own server). you can build a web of trust or vetting system on top of that like what tangled is doing for code.
Looks like South Korea is taking a page out of its northern neighbour's book.
Will this impact software exported out of Korea? I can't imagine Samsung will gain any popularity if their phones come prepackaged with AI censorship tools. It massively backfired when Apple planned to do it on iPhones.
My Samsung has "Galaxy AI" all over it, it's just an S23.
I've tried to use it out of curiosity and it rejects a lot of my image edits as inappropriate (violence) so the foundation is set.
Korea is backwards in technology in every possible way.
- 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
> - External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
Foreign internet content companies (like Twitch) got iced out a few years ago too due to “sending party pay” fees imposed by ISPs.
You're right. This stems from the characteristics of a small country. In fact, in Korea, Twitter (X) is looked down upon as something only crazy people use, and its image is not good.
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.
> In fact, in Korea, Twitter (X) is looked down upon as something only crazy people use, and its image is not good.
It's basically the same in many areas of the US. Social media use is very regional due to network effects.
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> Twitter (X) is looked down upon as something only crazy people
I think it has been the case globally since Elon Musk converted it into a neo-nazi propaganda platform.
> the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
What's hancom?
Awful Korean-developed MS Office clone.
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.
A web search will give you a faster and better answer than you will get by asking here.
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I thought people fantasized about choebol revenge stories and romance... Never realized Korea had any kind of "futuristic" reputation.
I agree with some of them. Others need much more nuance.
> - External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
This was a positive for literally every Korean resident and only a negative for Google shareholders and a few tourists who had to download a local maps app. Boohoo, politicians doing things benefiting their people.
> - You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything.
The reality is that this also has many upsides. Admitting this doesn't do well on HN though. The truth is that it's a defensible tradeoff, you can disagree with it but pretending it's clear-cut is ignorant.
> - the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
In 2026 nobody uses these except for when dealing with government institutions. Saying they're de facto for Korea as a whole is wild generalization.
I don't get the phone number thing - why is needing a $20 burner phone to post on a forum or blog a positive?
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They had the “Nth Room” case[0] which may have laid the road for a stronger approval to this.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Room_case
It was a horrible case indeed, but weren't they using Telegram.
It’s just funny that I get to know about this sort of Korean policies in HN not from main media (I live in Korea).
I had a few chances to apply for government grants in a startup. There is a lot of blind money for new techs but people managing it are simply not competent enough to understand them. Also, like some comments mentioned, tech infra around their management system is often old and very insecure.
It would be funny if someone hacked the database to block any praise of the current politicians and this censorship, only allowing criticism of it.
There seems to be less hacktivism now.
Huh, their internet forums look like Hacker News or such old-time sites rather than modern apps like Reddit or something. In terms of UI UX and use of web tech. Surprised these have like 20% population of country as visitors.
I wonder if it’s their language that made them stick with older forum style rather than English speaking world’s apps?
I like their way more.
Original: South Korean Online Communities Will Need to Scan Every Images with AI Censorship Tools
Will this affect non-Korean online communities in Korea? Like Instagram?
Minority Report wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual ffs.
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]
People predict that by 2032, the only country on earth to host websites will be the USA.
Or on the Tor network.
What do the bets on the prediction markets look like, and are these the same people that Trump is always referring?
Do they specify a particular model? Is that model public?
I wonder if this will create a market for freer forums for Koreans that are hosted in other countries?
Penis depictions will evolve.
They have stock in nvidia
U.S. social media has been doing this for a while, right?
The catholic church fought the printing press for hundreds of years. Lets see how long our rulers fight the internet.
No they didn’t, quite the opposite, they were the main customers and and certainly accelerated the spread of the technology. Of course banning the printing of specific books is another matter.
Islamic countries OTOH handle banned or strictly restricted its use. Coincidentally most progress there ceased and they were stuck in the 1500s for the next 400 years or so..
The printing press was very much an invention /not/ at the disposal of the citizens. It analogizes poorly to the Internet.
Actually it's perfect. How long did it take rulers to go from fighting the printing press to using it for propaganda and their own ambitions? The internet has just speed run that same course.
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Of course not, it’s the books that people had access to.
How many people are involved in ISPs, data centers, and other internet backbones? Most people are consumers rather than producers or "printing press" operators.
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Best to revisit your ideas pf which leaflets were popular, and who was making them in the 1500s
It's far worse.
What is CMS in this context?
Can't they simply move their hosting and domains to other countries?
Moving servers never move liability of citizens operating them
12 months time every country will require it.
"will need"???
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Starmer is about as left headed as a straight line railway across Australia. Corbyn was left (maybe).
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
> Corbyn was left (maybe).
Corbyn was (is?) a Castro-sympathizing communist. If you classify him as "left (maybe)", then I don't even want to ask what is "left" to you.
Guy is all over this post commenting nonsense because he's in love with the party that instated martial law recently and tried to do a coup. You're wasting your time on him.
You're completely right that the Korean blues are anything but left. Not even just compared to Corbyn, even compared to European labor parties (the champagne "social democrats" in each country). Biden was more left-wing than the Korean blues. That tells you everything.
In many ways the Korean blues are more nationalist than the reds, which can't be said about basically any modern relevant left-wing party elsewhere. Another good indicator they're absolutely not left-wing.
he is objectively left wing. People are over indexing on his controversies instead of looking at his policy platform as a whole. Also take into account that he is in a democracy the leans right on many un-impactful but hot topic issues.
Starmer is a Fabian. He is textbook, self identified left and socialist. He is pretty much a poster child for leftism.
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What does the left have to do with this? South Korea has had draconian anti-online privacy laws for as long as it has had the internet.
False. Korea has always had liberal freedom of speech online.
maybe that's where the irony starts?
If the implication is that the left is more willing to violate freedoms, you're leaving out that the right-wing president was ousted for attempting to subvert democracy by instituting martial law for no good reason.
Sure buddy, just omit the fact that the last president tried to do a coup and is now serving a long prison sentence. It's all the fault of the left leaning guy, there was no censorship or state surveillance in Korea before that.
I’m Korean too, but people forget that the right wing has also enforced censorship. Personally, I think the Korean right wing cries out for freedom, but in reality their ideology is rooted in the anti-communist thought of the anti-communist liberal era. I myself have somewhat negative feelings toward communism, but the so-called 'right-wing' regime in Korea is really just nostalgia for dictatorship. The current Korean administration is called 'left-wing' only because the opposition is far-right. In fact, the Korean Political History Association has long classified the 'Democratic Party'(Party name) administration as conservative. This is simply due to a poor understanding of politics[1],[2]
[1]https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202502272123025
[2]https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereA...
> the right wing has also enforced censorship
Not familiar with Korean politics, but both left and right are immensely pro-censorship here in America. For the most part, the only thing that's saving us (at least so far) is that they can't agree on what to censor.
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I don’t think this framing works nor is your attitude of "I'm korean I automatically know more than a foreigner who studied Korean history". It is true that Korean conservatives have used censorship and authoritarian language before such as Yoon’s 2024 martial-law attempt is the obvious recent example, and nobody serious should minimize that but that does not make the Democratic Party some neutral actor, or make censorship a uniquely partisan problem. The current ruling party's previous president, Moon Jae-in’s gov, passed laws specifically suppressing anti-North Korea leaflet and threatened activists against sending them into North Korea which the Constitutional Court later struck it down as an excessive restriction on free speech. That is a clear sign of suppressing free speech at home to directly appease an authoritarian country!
Same with media regulation in 2021, the same party tht is in power now pushed laws that directly supressed press freedom, prompting strong condemnation from Reporters without Borders and international human rights group. And lo behold you have laws now extend beyond simply press to free speech on the internet exactly as they had warned 5 years ago.
The trend of suppressing free speech continues under current admin where lawmakers passed another false-information bill allowing up to 5x damages against news orgs and independent journalist's YouTube channels, where there is no bipartisan oversight in arbitration and it is heavily in control by the ruling "democratic party".
The Korean Democratic Party is not Marxist, but seemingly have shown affinity for them from failed sunshine policy that directly enabled the development of nuclear weapons and human rights abuses with North Korea, pushing more state intervention/lawfare than any other party in history. Korean ideology does not map cleanly onto US/Europe labels and attempt to smearing conservatives to gatekeep the true political reality of Sout hKorea and its history is simply immature.
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Starmer is not left-leaning, he's a liberal (and supports austerity). People should learn the difference between the left, the right and liberalism.
He's a twonk and Britain is essentially a police state at this point. The American Revolutionary War was fought over far less than what is going on right now.
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Traditional labels are becoming useless anyway, liberal can mean anything from libertarian free market enjoyer to radical progressive depending on who you are talking to. And I am talking about self-identified labels!
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.
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at this point I don't get bogged down in the details. They're all just different masks for authoritarianism.
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Are crooks called liberals these days?
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The previous fascist governments were not much better. The oligarchy derived from that.
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