hankyoreh

Park Sung-mi

By Eum Sung-won, staff reporter

A bulletin board on the Blue House website was slowed or blocked by heavy traffic on Apr. 27 and 28 after a post criticizing President Park Geun-hye‘s response to the Sewol sinking resulted in two to three times the site’s regular number of visitors.

Access to the site was slowed or blocked by the flood of users responding to the post, which described Park as “irresponsible” and argued, “We don‘t need a President who doesn’t know how to take responsibility.”

The post was one of over one thousand that went up on the Blue House website to blast the response to the sinking by Park, who critics said has focused on blaming “bureaucrats” while ducking any responsibility herself. Netizens responded positively to the way the bulletin board has turned into a “public forum.”

The message, titled “Why you should not be President,” was posted by a user identified only by the surname Jeong at around 9:30 am on Apr. 27. By the same time the next morning, it had already been viewed 450,000 times.

“The reason the position of President is so difficult is because of the weight of responsibility,” the post said.

The message began by saying that Park “did not even know what she had to do” in response to the Sewol sinking.

“People are wondering if money isn‘t the issue in the rescue, but the answer really depends on who is acting,” it continued.

“A leader would know that the people under her might hesitate because of the costs involved. But if a leader is only threatening you - saying ’Do everything you can, and suffer punishment if you don‘t succeed’ - without taking responsibility for the costs on your behalf, and ducks her own responsibility when it doesn‘t work out, then who is going to do it?” the message asked.

“The people who are getting things done on the ground without orders are the ones who stopped their rescue activities and gave all their energies to protocol, the ones who quickly saw the unfavorable news as canards and understood how to control it, and the people who tried to get the public to hold the captain and company accountable for everything,” it continued.

“That’s all because of the ordinary playbook they operate by.”

The post was shared widely on social media, and in addition to the more than 450,000 views it registered by the morning after it went up, the post also received hundreds of replies agreeing with its message.

As word got out about it, “Blue House” became the top real-time search term on major portal sites, and the website was flooded with two to three times its ordinary traffic, preventing some visitors from accessing it.

In total, the Blue House bulletin board received over a thousand posts criticizing Park and the administration after Jeong‘s message went up.

Users posting or replying to messages on the Blue House website have to provide personal information, including confirmation of their identity through certificate verification or use of an “i-PIN.”

“There was a lot of attention to the post on the Blue House bulletin board about President Park behaving irresponsibly at a time when people were hoping to see responsible behavior in the Sewol recovery process,” said Rho Jin-chul, a professor of sociology at Kyungpook National University.

The original post was deleted at around 11 am on Apr. 28, prompting many to ask whether the Blue House had forced the poster to remove it.

According to Blue House spokesperson Min Kyung-wook, the original poster Jeong wrote another message that morning saying the message was written by someone else and copied from a Facebook page.

Min added that Jeong had expressed surprise at the large response and apologized for the controversy, asking the administrator to delete the message he had uploaded.

“According to bulletin board policy, a message can be deleted by its writer, and users have been notified by e-mail that if they want to delete something, they can delete it themselves after confirming their identity,” said a Blue House official on condition of anonymity.

Of the Apr. 27 post, Min said, “It looks as though the poster deleted it himself.”

documentary film director

The actual writer of the original message was documentary film director Park Sung-mi, 35, who posted it to her Facebook page early on Apr. 25.

Park later sent out a Twitter message reading, “I’m the author of ‘We don’t need a President like that.‘ The person who posted it to the Blue House website was not the author, and they asked the bulletin board administrator to delete it because it was causing problems. I’ll post it again if I can access the bulletin board.”

Before the post was removed from the Blue House website, Park had saved it along with the 212 comments. She reposted it to the website on the evening of Apr. 28.

“Many of the comments were gems,” Park said in an interview with the Hankyoreh.

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