Update on Korea’s online identity system
To address the recent cyber-bullying issues I mentioned earlier this year, Korea’s government has installed a real-name comment system that went live last week and basically removes anonymity on the comment systems of the country’s most important websites (Daum, Naver, etc…)
This trial is extremely interesting to follow. Such a system will probably become necessary in all countries around the globe, but it is not clear yet what social cost it will have. Will the end of anonymity hamper democracy? Will the discussions simply move out of the controlled zones to foreign countries? Will there be a separation, the identitary Internet vs the anonymous one?
Global Voices Online is following the experiment and sharing the early findings, citing bloggers’ reactions across the country:
Since the real-name comment system, the level of malignant contents has been lower, but the number has not been dramatically decreasing. It will take time for the bad comments to disappear from the internet. Until now, it seems that it is not so effective. What I’m worried more is that these respondents with bad habits will be dispersed to small community sites and, therefore, the holistic atmosphere of the internet would be generally bad.[…]
it [the system] could damage the basic principle and freedom of the internet, […] it could interrupt freedom of speech, and the last is the possibility it could be controlled by the authorities.
[…]
Even though 0.06 percent is the only malignant respondents, this small number causes problems and appears as a social issue, and, therefore, we should solve this problem. Then, is the ‘real name system’ the right answer? Due to this, the freedom of opinion and speech would be controlled, and then how can we compensate for these problems?
All this for 0.06% of the population behaving badly. I wonder what the percentage of “bad guys” creating social problems is in real life, and how much energy is deployed to counter them?
