Supporters of former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol rally against a hearing to review a special prosecutor’s request for his arrest near the Seoul Central District Court in Seoul, South Korea, on July 9.Ahn Young-joon/The Associated Press
Eleanor Yuneun Park is an editor at The Globe and Mail.
After a chaotic eight months, South Korea appears to finally be in calmer political waters.
Last month, Yoon Suk Yeol – the former president of Korea who was impeached for declaring martial law in December – was arrested again, after a special prosecutor deemed him to be a risk for destroying evidence in his forthcoming trial. Nationwide protests over his dramatic emergency order have long subsided. And in June, Lee Jae Myung, who rallied members of his Democratic Party to gather at the National Assembly to nullify Mr. Yoon’s decree, was elected president in a vote with the highest turnout in nearly three decades.
But Mr. Yoon’s legacy remains: a disillusioned generation of young Koreans who are more divided by gender than ever before. Indeed, a 2021 Ipsos survey of 28 countries found that South Korea had the worst perceived tensions between men and women, between those who hold progressive and traditional values, and between the old and young. This continuing trend potentially marks a historic and deeply concerning turning point – and Korea’s dire example offers a warning for what could happen in other countries around the world, including Canada.
In the recent election, now-president Lee Jae Myung received only 24 per cent of votes from men in their 20s, and for the first time in Korean history, the highest percentage of their votes – more than 37 per cent – went to a third-party candidate, Lee Jun-Seok. Mr. Lee, the leader of the conservative Reform Party, has garnered popularity by establishing himself as a champion for young men, and criticizing feminism and “reverse discrimination.” While he is only 40 years old, he has been involved in South Korean politics for a decade; he served as an adviser in former president Park Geun-Hye’s administration, and when he was the party chairman of Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party, he helped him win the presidency on the strength of an explicitly anti-feminist agenda and promises to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which is tasked with supporting children and single parents and addressing gender-based violence and discrimination, including digital sex crimes. His statement that claims of discrimination against women are based in a “groundless victim mentality” was classified as hate speech in 2021 by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea.
It’s all abhorrent. But Lee Jun-Seok’s ability to nevertheless draw such support from men in their 20s is a frightening indicator of how misogynistic and anti-feminist ideals now pervade South Korea’s mainstream discourse – especially among the young. The problem stems from the growing popularity among a generation of digital natives of right-wing online spaces, many of which have been fuelled and fomented by politicians.
In South Korea, recent conservative administrations, especially under former president Lee Myung-bak, have used popular Reddit-adjacent Korean websites as propaganda channels. When Mr. Lee’s approval rating dropped six months after taking office in 2008, his administration started using the National Intelligence Service (NIS) for psychological operations to intervene in domestic politics, publishing fake tweets, inundating news articles’ comment sections with pro-government posts, and spreading memes and disinformation about liberal politicians. This project even went so far as to consult psychologists to edit images of prominent liberal politicians to create humiliating photos and messages, and then circulating these images on popular sites notorious for offensive jokes and memes.
Platforms such as Ilbe Storehouse that the NIS targeted are ones that fostered nihilistic, destructive attitudes among users, and mocked women, progressives, and the Jeolla province, which is known for historical pro-democracy protests, with gross and casual slurs – all seemingly for laughs.
I remember first hearing many of these jokes and slurs myself when I was in elementary school, growing up in the South Korean city of Busan. I had no idea they were politically motivated or that they had sexist undertones; I thought it was just popular slang that the funny guys in class used, and in retrospect, those guys probably had no idea what the jokes meant, either. Ilbe was just where everyone online got their information and memes. But glued to our computers and smartphones, we became desensitized to the weight of the seemingly funny words, images, and political messages. As a 2024 study found, the mainstreaming of extreme content in the guise of jokes and nihilism can significantly increase the content’s reach – and at Ilbe’s peak in 2015, it was the eighth most-visited website in Korea, with a pageview count that even exceeded Facebook’s in the country.
South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung secures presidency after snap election
The jokes on Ilbe often targeted people that users viewed as “free-riders,” according to an analysis by SisaIN magazine, including women seen as free-riding on men for free meals on dates and liberals free-riding on the success of conservatives credited with lifting Korea out of poverty after the Second World War. That rhetoric is reflected today among the young Korean men of my generation, who grew up with intentionally politicized humour and memes; they’re drawn to Lee Jun-Seok and his facade of advocating for “fairness” while resisting gender-equality initiatives, arguing that young Koreans “did not experience any inequality of opportunity based on sex,” even though South Korea has the largest gender wage gap among OECD countries.
That’s not to say there aren’t real social issues at play. Young Korean men are falling through the cracks of the status aspiration gap, where they see themselves as far from where they believe they should be; that’s particularly difficult in a country as hyper-competitive and capitalist as South Korea. This disillusionment and resentment can curdle into resistance to equality when mixed with targeted and compelling content on their favourite sites and Mr. Lee’s mainstream rhetoric of marginalizing the perceived “free-riders.”
What’s happening in Korea is happening elsewhere, too. Donald Trump won last year’s presidential election in part by drawing the support of 56 per cent of young white men, having appeared on the platforms of online influencers in the so-called “manosphere.” Despair over marriage prospects, employment and the possibility for stable and affordable housing has led young men to seek alternative narratives and influencers putting forth a simplistic, hypermasculine ideal. Many Republican politicians have further fuelled this divisive thinking by pushing traditional family values and blaming diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that they see as granting “unearned privilege” to certain people. And in Canada, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre gave a long interview to Jordan Peterson, who is popular among young men, where he blamed “wokeism” for a spike in hate crimes and spoke about a desire to return to “traditional values.” The ideologies themselves are already dangerous. But they become even more so when coupled with disinformation purposefully transmitted in online echo-chambers.
Over the years, there has already been a mass migration among U.S. conspiracy theorists – many of whom are Trump supporters, and who have found common cause in feeling silenced – from popular but regulated social-media networks such as Facebook and what is now X to Gab, MeWe, Discord and Telegram. Those networks, which tend to be smaller and fringier and thus harder to regulate, exploded in popularity after the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Facebook shut down nearly 900 accounts linked to the armed movements and what was then called Twitter banned Mr. Trump from its platform.
Now, the U.S. President posts to more than 10 million followers on Truth Social, a network that he himself launched in early 2022. Mr. Trump is now announcing policy and navigating war in the same virtual echo chamber he actively fuelled with QAnon conspiracy theories, misogynistic claims against former vice-president Kamala Harris, and memes showing Democratic leaders and policymakers being thrown into prison.
It’s easy to dismiss jokes and memes as harmless artifacts of comedy. But Korea offers a cautionary tale about how they can be weaponized into something closer to political tragedy.