Closing Pandora’s Box on Naver: Toward Ending Cyber Harassment

Abstract

In reaction to the high-profile celebrity suicides of Sulli and Goo Hara in 2019, attributed to cyberbullying, Korea's most popular internet platform Naver introduced a range of self-regulatory measures to curtail targeted hate comments online in 2020. These regulations include removing the entertainment comment section and pseudonymizing users by revealing comment history but maintaining user anonymity. To take a closer look at celebrity cyberbullying and analyze the effects of Naver's novel self-regulatory measures, we collected data about comments and emoticons from Naver News. In the celebrity space, we find that Sulli and Goo Hara indeed received negative comments and expressions using emoticons. However, our analyses of the self-regulatory measures demonstrate that while user interaction on Naver has decreased, the percentage of negative comments has also fallen, showing that Naver's regulations have had favorable effects.

Online harassment of Japanese celebrities and influencers

“…As a supplemental approach, online legal consultation, i.e., support from specialists, can be helpful. Displaying attitudes adopted by platforms to reject online harassment also inhibits toxic posts (Kang et al, 2022 ).…”

“…This could mitigate the stigma of online harassment (Mesch and Talmud, 2006;Andalibi et al, 2016;Foster and Fullagar, 2018), victimblaming (Scott et al, 2019;Hand, 2021), and propagating offensive behavior (Bliuc et al, 2018;Yokotani and Takano, 2021). Educating people accordingly can ameliorate the adverse effects of sensational coverage (Kang et al, 2022).…”

“…A famous victim targeted by several people tends to attract victim-blaming (Hand, 2021). Furthermore, the victimization of famous people tends to attract sensational media coverage (Kang et al, 2022). Therefore, victims are often under severe suppression (Hand, 2021;Kang et al, 2022).…”

News portals as a gateway to civic engagement: the case of South Korea

“…Notable problems include cyber harassment and hate speech against minorities in comments sections along with news articles of questionable quality aiming to take advantage of algorithms. For instance, in March 2020, Naver removed sections where users could comment on its entertainment news stories, following criticisms against serious cyber harassment toward celebrities (Kang et al, 2022). Hate speech against minority groups in comment sections is also increasingly widespread; exposure to hate speech can bring about harmful effects, ranging from going along with the stereotypes to avoiding news stories of and comments on a given issue (Kim et al, 2019).…”

Upvotes? Downvotes? No Votes? Understanding the relationship between reaction mechanisms and political discourse on Reddit

“…Focusing on design features that explicitly structure discussions, Rho et al [99] showed that the design input of political hashtags on social media influenced the deliberative quality of online discussions causing an increase in emotional and more black-and-white rhetoric. Kang et al discuss various policy changes on the South Korean platform Naver including the removal of negative emoticons that aimed to reduce the amount of abusive and offensive comments [70]. Kriplean et al [74] built a platform called ConsiderIt that helped users understand previous user posts.…”