hankyoreh

By Lim In-taek, staff writer

Reports of online racism directed at New Frontier Party proportional representation lawmaker-elect Jasmine Lee have been exaggerated, according to an analysis of social networking activity.

The invective was found to represent just over 1% of the SNS messages about Lee, a Filipina who married a South Korean and became a naturalized citizen in 1998.

An examination of the exposure of tweets referencing “Jasmine Lee” between Apr. 1 and 17 found 13,955 points of exposure (POE- tweets, retweets or comments) containing racist comments and 54,032 giving false election pledges for her, together accounting for just 1.2% of the 5,443,704 POE. The total increased to 2% when the 43,680 tweets containing allegations that Lee forged her educational background.

The analysis was conducted by the SNS opinion research organization Daumsoft. “Tweet exposure” is an index for examining the reach of tweets based on the number of retweets and followers.

The study found that 4,618,357, or 84.8% of the total POE expressed anti-racist messages or concern about exaggeration by major conservative newspapers. The remainder consisted mainly of neutral references and objections to biased criticisms of Lee.

Twitter references to Lee were minimal before the general election, but increased sharply around Apr. 16 after news outlets reported on racist attacks on her, including messages predicting an “increase in brokered marriages.” Without those reports, the tweets containing racist accusations of forged credentials would likely have gone largely unnoticed.

Indeed, only one of the tweets about Lee that was retweeted more than 20 times was a distortion of her election pledges. A message posted by a minor, containing references to “free health care for illegals and multicultural families” and “preferential university admission for multicultural households,” was retweeted 1027 times.

Two messages insulting Lee as a “mail-order bride” were retweeted 1,335 times.

Many of the tweets were critical of opposition-leaning Twitter users. One read, “Heard certain opposition Twitterers said foul-mouthed things about NFP’s Jasmine Lee, calling her a ‘[expletive deleted] bought by mail.’ Giving people like that freedom of expression is like giving knives to gangsters.”

This prompted another user to fire back, writing, “Even if someone actually said something like that, it was probably some empty-headed [expletive deleted]. I also think it may be a scheme to stigmatize Twitter and progressives.”

Daumsoft director Gwon Mi-gyeong said the major Twitter attention on Lee came after the media reports. “It’s mostly been people speaking out against racism, so the media reports are way off base,” Gwon said.

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