“She was wearing a police uniform, then said she was a JTBC reporter… She looks Chinese. Who is she really?”<\/p>\n
The post includes a video appearing to show a woman being escorted away from a protest site.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Another post<\/a> with a similar caption includes a collage of photos showing the same woman purportedly wearing a black cap.<\/p>\n Screenshot of false posts taken on June 26 with red Xs added by AFP<\/p>\n It circulated as frustration with and suspicion of South Korea’s election watchdog reached a boiling point, after dozens of polling stations experienced an unprecedented ballot shortage<\/a> during local elections on June 3 (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n Thousands of protestors have demanded a rerun of the nationwide vote<\/a> — the first since President Lee Jae Myung took office after ex-leader Yoon Suk Yeol’s ouster over his botched attempt at imposing martial law in late 2024 (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n Anger has also rekindled longstanding conspiracy theories about Chinese infiltration of the National Election Commission (NEC) and interference with local polls. During recent demonstrations, false claims that Chinese agents were\u00a0disguised<\/a> as South Korean police officers also proliferated online.<\/p>\n Similar outlandish claims about the pictured individual’s identity took off after live-streamed video showed her climbing out a window of a vote-counting centre in eastern Seoul on June 5.<\/p>\n The posts accused<\/a> her of being a Chinese national<\/a> and questioned why she was allowed to enter the vote-counting centre while others accused<\/a> her of\u00a0disguising herself as a\u00a0police officer<\/a>.<\/p>\n But none of these claims are true.<\/p>\n Ballot shortage protest<\/p>\n A\u00a0reverse image search<\/a> on Google suggests the suspicions about the pictured individual’s identity began to\u00a0spread<\/a> when she briefly appeared in live-streamed YouTube videos as thousands of protesters encircled<\/a> the SK Olympic Handball Gymnasium, which served as a vote-counting facility on June 5 (archived here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n A livestream posted by Freedom University — a right-wing youth group with over 161,000 subscribers — shows a crowd of protesters blocking the individual from exiting the building around 3pm.<\/p>\n In the video, she appears to show protesters and police her press pass before heading back into the building. During this brief encounter, livestream viewers begin posting comments claiming the individual is an NEC employee.<\/p>\n Screenshot of the YouTube livestream captured on June 25, 2026, with comments highlighted by AFP<\/p>\n JTBC journalist<\/p>\n The individual in the posts and the live-streamed video is\u00a0Song Hye-su<\/a>, a social affairs reporter at South Korean cable channel JTBC (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n In a phone interview on June 23, Song told AFP that she had arrived at the SK Olympic Handball Gymnasium at around 9:30am on June 5 for a reporting assignment.<\/p>\n The protesters who encircled the gymnasium that day also blocked the facility’s entrances, forcing Song and several other staffers trapped inside to climb out through a window. The altercation resulted in a number of people, including Song, sustaining<\/a> minor injuries, according to local reports<\/a> (archived here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Around 6pm, Song said she “thought it would be safe to leave and climbed out through the window”, but quickly became trapped by the angry crowd. In the livestream posted by Freedom University, Song is seen encircled<\/a> by protesters chanting, “CCP (Chinese Communist party) out” (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n Screenshots of the YouTube livestream, with Song highlighted in yellow by AFP<\/p>\n Contrary to the circulating claims, Song is not Chinese. She showed AFP her resident registration card, confirming she is a South Korean national.<\/p>\n Song is also not an NEC employee; she has worked as a journalist since 2019. She interned with the daily newspaper\u00a0Kukmin Ilbo<\/a> and worked at another digital news outlet<\/a> before joining JTBC in 2023 (archived here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n A review of her work shows that she has not solely covered election stories, and has reported on a broad range of topics including\u00a0vehicle fires<\/a>, industrial accidents<\/a> and crime<\/a> (archived here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n The accusation that Song had disguised herself as a police officer stems from a photo that appears to show her wearing a police officer’s hat.<\/p>\n An examination of the circulating photo, however, shows this is a visual illusion: when zooming into the photo, the outline of the black hat is disconnected from Song’s hair in the background — an indication that the hat was in fact worn by someone else between Song and the camera.<\/p>\n Screenshot of photo shared in the false posts, with visual details highlighted by AFP <\/p>\n Moreover, none of the live-streamed footage of the demonstration shows Song wearing police uniform.<\/p>\n A legal representative for Song told AFP on June 24 that they had filed a criminal complaint with the Songpa Police Station in Seoul on charges of illegal confinement<\/a> and confinement resulting in injury<\/a> (archived here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n In a separate statement<\/a> on June 8, the Journalists Association of Korea condemned the incident, stating that a “JTBC reporter was confined, assaulted, verbally abused and subjected to profanities” and that “violence against the press can not be justified for any reason”\u00a0(archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n AFP has previously debunked other false claims<\/a> stemming from the ballot shortage scandal<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"<span>Screenshot](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ba4a383ef0733f8ecbd98395faf9a282.jpeg\"\/)
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