User:Rikiya13/sandbox

The nation of South Korea is a world leader in Internet and broadband penetration, but its citizens do not have access to free and unfiltered Internet. According to Michael Breen, censorship in South Korea is rooted in the South Korean government's historical tendency to see themselves as "the benevolent parent of the masses". However, anonymity on the internet has undermined the system of Korean honorifics and social hierarchies, making it easier for South Koreans to subject political leaders to "humiliation".

In the first period, from 1995 to 2002, the government passed the Telecommunications Business Act (TBA), which was the first internet censorship law in the world. The act created a body called Internet Communications Ethics Committee (ICEC), who monitored Internet and made recommendations for content to be removed. The ICEC pursued criminal prosecutions of those who make unlawful statements and blocked several foreign websites. In the first eight months of 1996, ICEC roughly took down 220,000 messages on Internet sites.

The second period, from 2002 to 2008, the government passed a revision of the TBA legislation. This allowed the ICEC to engage in more sophisticated internet policing and allowed other bureaucratic entities to monitor the internet for illegal speech or take down websites that violate the laws. During this time, there was a political drive to increase extensive internet censorship with large number of cases of suicide beginning to rise from online rumors. In 2007, over 200,000 incidents of cyberbullying were reported.

The third period started in 2008, when the presidential election of President Lee Myung-bak inaugurated major reforms in the broadcast censorship. In 2008, the government passed a law that created a new agency called the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC). The KCSC is South Korea’s Internet censorship body and replacing the ICEC. The KCSC was created to regulate internet content. The first major change by the Lee Myung-bak government was to require websites with over 100,000 daily visitors to require their users to register their real name and social security numbers. A second change made by the government was to allow KCSC to suspend or delete any web posting or articles for 30 days as soon as the complaint is filed. The reasons for the new law was to combat cyberbullying in South Korea. Every week, portions of the Korean web are taken down by the KCSC. In 2013, around 23,000 Korean webpages were deleted and another 63,000 blocked by the KCSC.

South Korea's government maintains a broad-ranging approach toward the regulation of specific online content and imposes a substantial level of censorship on election-related discourse and on a large number of websites that the government deems subversive or socially harmful. Such policies are particularly pronounced with regard to anonymity on the Internet. The OpenNet Initiative classifies Internet censorship in South Korea as pervasive in the conflict/security area, as selective in the social area, and found no evidence of filtering in the political and Internet tools areas. In 2011 South Korea was included on Reporters Without Borders list of countries Under Surveillance. This designation persisted in 2012, where the report suggests South Korea's censorship is similar to those of Russia and Egypt.