Cyber Troops in Networked Korea

Characteristics of Comment Troops in South Korea

Tracking back the evolution of comment troops in South Korea, we can summarize characteristics of NIS-led digital manipulation activities as such:
  1. The NIS-led digital manipulation is driven by political collusion between an intelligence agency and the far-right political party.
  2. The NIS-led manipulation has been "successful" by combining organizational top-down efforts and paid recruitment of citizens.
  3. While engaged citizens were paid, and thus monetary motives cannot be ignored, they could morally justify their participation by framing their activities as "crusades" for a greater cause.
  4. The NIS's Cyber Squad partnered with military institutions to frame their raison d'être as psychological warfare against North Korea. In fact, their utmost function was a smear campaign to distort the opposition political party in South Korea.
  5. Their rhetoric was often evocative of the Cold War era, often equating the opposition party to spies from, or colluders with, North Korea. 
  6. Comment troops were technologically savvy—they were aggressive in adopting cutting-edge social media strategies such as using traffic growth software, multi-account operations, and hashtag strategies. 
Some of these characteristics are not idiosyncratic to South Korea. For example, the collateral effort between government agents, militia, and paid online workers is one of the most common elements of cyber troops observed globally (Brashaw & Howard, 2017).

As seen in the case of South Korea in this module, cyber troops often meddle with political processes and manipulate public opinion. This has significant ramifications for a nation's democracy, and holds back the digital culture from Barlow's vision for self-governance. 

 

Author Biography

K. Hazel Kwon is an associate professor with expertise in quantitative social media research. Her research centers on social technologies with an emphasis on the dynamics in which networked environment influences audience engagement, collective sense-making, emotional contagion, and news diffusion.

Kwon’s work is interdisciplinary, often involving information system scientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. The National Science Foundation and HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) have supported her research.

Her publications have appeared in multiple journals, including the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, Computers in Human Behaviors, American Behavioral Scientists, and Social Science Computer Reviews.

As an active researcher and scholar, Kwon has received numerous academic honors, including the Herbert S. Dordick Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association, the Kappa Tao Alpha Research Award from National Honor Society in Journalism and Mass Communication, the Jung-Sook Lee Award from the Association for Journalism and Mass Communication, a top-four paper award from the National Communication Association, and a visiting scholar fellowship from the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Business, Ryerson University.

Kwon previously served as a graduate faculty affiliate at ASU’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. Before joining ASU, she served on the faculty at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She received a doctoral degree in communication with a minor in statistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2011.

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