Illiberalism in South Korea

The crackdown on rumours has prompted some 1m South Koreans to ditch local chat apps within a week—including KakaoTalk, the country’s biggest—for Telegram, an encrypted service based in Berlin. This week KakaoTalk said it would stop honouring warrants from prosecutors (who have denied they monitor private conversations). Reporters without Borders ranks the level of surveillance of South Korea’s internet as similar to that of Egypt and Thailand. Last year censors deleted or blocked over 80,000 web pages, for pornography or gambling, but North Korean sites, along with those of sympathisers of North Korea, are also blocked under the National Security Law, a cold-war legacy. That law was once abused to silence critics, and it continues to rankle. But now the defamation law has become the government’s tool of choice, says Mr Cho.

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