A security research team released evidence that netizen comments on Naver – Korea’s largest internal portal, are manipulated by China
On December 21, a security research team led by Professor Yoon Min-woo revealed that China has been manipulating comments on South Korea’s largest portal site, Naver, releasing numerical evidence.
In particular, the team had captured numerous movements suspected of organized comment activities by China through big data analysis of Naver’s news comments using web crawling (data extraction). The analysis was conducted on comments attached to articles related to China and diplomacy from September to November.
In the end, the team identified over 50 accounts that posted comments with characteristics suspected of being related to China’s influence operations. Common characteristics of these account include frequent use of Chinese transliteration or language rules when naming accounts, inclusion of topics like “COVID-19 originates in the U.S theory” in the comments, consistent spelling errors, and mixing of Chinese in the comments. These accounts also showed a pattern of following each other to increase influence in cyberspace.
According to the team, manipulated comments of these accounts mainly focused on Chinese superiority or derogatory remarks about Korea, and numerous comments that fueled regional, generational, and gender conflicts were found.
For instances, they spammed various articles with comments such as “Gyeongsang and Jeolla provinces are still uncivilized, unlike Jeju people who now speak Seoul dialect and became more civilized”, “Gyeongbokgung (a Korean palace) belongs to Chinese culture”, “Korean women eat like pigs”, “If women have power, this nation will go on a path of decline”, and so on.
It was estimated that at least 30,000 comments were made just in September to November this year in China’s attempt to influence domestic public opinion and sentiment via online spaces.
Accordingly, Korea’s National Intelligence Service is reportedly aware of the seriousness of the issue and is monitoring the situation.
However, the research team also stated that it is not clear whether the aforementioned comment-writing accounts are associated with Chinese public security or authorities. Tracking them requires cooperation from the companies, and due to this lack of cooperation, it is challenging to trace them even with the assistance of the police.
Nevertheless, the research team argued that it is difficult to consider the comments as voluntary postings by ordinary people, considering the content (praising the Chinese Communist Party), organization (mutual followings), and means (traces of writing in Chinese) of the comments.
Source: Naver
