South Korean Internet Censorship

On 26 March South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication announced a new crackdown on Internet content (to read the announcement, in Korean, click here, to read a related news story from the JoongAng Daily click here). The focus of the announcement was on pornographic user-generated content posted on popular Korean portal sites - this after a porn clip made it onto Yahoo Korea for a few hours last week.

Clips deemed inappropriate will be ordered off the portals, visitors to banned sites will likely be greeted by messages like the one shown below.

The reason given for the new and strengthened measures was to protect Korean youth from the seedier sides of the Internet. While not in favor of censorship, I can't really fault the Ministry for its goal here.

What I can and do fault the Ministry for, however, is it's restrictions on access to websites it deems pro-North Korean - also announced as part of the crackdown. Recently, while returning to a site I had accessed frequently from Seoul a few years ago while doing research for my MA thesis, I was met with the screen below:

(for more info, and the picture, please head to my website, 1stopKorea.com)