On May 24, President Lee Jae-myung explicitly addressed the necessity of shutting down the far-right online community Daily Best (Ilbe) through his personal X (formerly Twitter) account. Along with this, he raised the need to review and foster public discussion on measures such as punitive damages and administrative fines, adding that he would instruct the Cabinet to evaluate these options.

The reason for President Lee’s overt fury toward Ilbe is unambiguous. Established in 2010, Ilbe is a far-right community website whose members have committed numerous outrages, including mocking victims of major tragedies like the Sewol ferry disaster and ridiculing deceased political figures. Appended to President Lee’s social media post was an article reporting on a visitor, presumably an Ilbe member, who took mocking photos at the 17th memorial service for the late President Roh Moo-hyun.

However, a president’s intent to review the shutdown of a specific website at a Cabinet meeting carries a institutional weight entirely different from mere individual anger. While individual posts can already be subjected to sanctions like deletion, shutting down an entire website requires its primary operational purpose to be fundamentally unlawful, as seen with gambling platforms or digital sex crime networks. In his post, President Lee characterized Ilbe as "fostering social division and conflict through mockery and insults," effectively viewing the platform as a force detrimental to democratic society.

Amidst these developments, the amendment to the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection—the so-called Anti-Fake News Act—is scheduled to take effect on July 7, even as questions regarding its highly ambiguous criteria remain unresolved. The legislation explicitly categorizes information that publicly "incites discrimination against" or "stirs hatred toward" specific individuals or groups as illegal content subject to government deliberation and sanctions. To secure institutional legitimacy, a clause exempting "satire and parody" was included. This marks a substantial expansion from the existing scope, which was restricted to information defaming others by stating false facts. Yet, concrete benchmarks remain opaque. Prior to its passage, critics warned that the bill risked enabling arbitrary interpretation by public authorities, but the legislation was enacted without any concrete follow-up measures to clarify its boundaries. Consequently, concerns persist that the law could be applied unpredictably and fluidly depending on political convenience.

Even with ambiguous criteria, socially acceptable determinations could still be achieved if the independence of the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) and the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC)—both deliberative body frameworks—were fully guaranteed. In reality, however, these institutions are not insulated from the will of the chief executive. During a parliamentary confirmation hearing last year, KCC Chairman Kim Jong-chul remarked that the president holds comprehensive operational authority over the agency. Similarly, KCSC Chairman Ko Kwang-heon downplayed the president’s demand for an apology from a specific media outlet as merely a principled observation. While the KCSC has traditionally utilized an internal threshold of 70% illegal content to justify a website shutdown, this remains an uncodified administrative custom rather than a statutory mandate.

President Lee’s remarks on shutting down Ilbe transcend the issue of hate speech or fake news. It signals a precedent where the personal judgment and rhetoric of the chief executive can trigger policy and judicial sanctions against a specific group. Furthermore, starting this July, such executive actions could be cloaked in procedural legitimacy. If so, this problem extends far beyond a single platform like Ilbe. While these measures might temporarily be packaged as democratic through legal procedures, censoring an entire forum for public discourse is inherently unconstitutional.

Through the political turmoil experienced two winters ago, South Korean society learned the bitter lesson of why the public must remain vigilant against any ruler's unilateral interpretation of democratic values. Allowing a single individual—particularly the supreme leader—to arbitrarily define what constitutes an anti-democratic or anti-social force is highly perilous. Even if over 70% of Ilbe's content has been rife with hatred and derision, any institutional sanction against the platform must be subjected to a far more complex process of public deliberation and social consensus.

                                                                                                          Kim Hong-chan