The Herald Business-Daeryuk Aju Future Leaders Forum
Amended Network Act set to take effect Sunday
'Progressive groups opposed it, but the powerful ruling party pushed it through'
Lawmaker proposes media literacy as alternative
People Power Party lawmaker Choi Hyeong-du warned Tuesday that Sunday's scheduled implementation of the amended Network Act will be "a day when people who use media outlets or online networks must be extremely careful," adding that they will face "fivefold punitive damages."
Speaking at the Future Leaders Forum co-hosted by The Herald Business and law firm Daeryuk Aju at the Ruby Hall of The Plaza Hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul, Choi criticized the Democratic Party of Korea for branding the legislation the "Anti-Disinformation Act." "The Democratic Party gave it a fine-sounding name," he said, "but we call it the 'online gag law.'"
Choi said the international context should not be ignored. "We need to look at why the United States and Europe are cautious about this kind of measure," he said. "The US government views the Network Act as a trade barrier and has raised it as a trade issue, and yet the powerful government and ruling party pushed it through despite opposition from progressive civic groups, progressive media scholars, legal scholars and even the journalists' union."
He identified the law's definition of disinformation as its most serious flaw. "The provision defining covered content as 'information that is wholly or partly false, or has been distorted so as to be mistaken for fact' is extremely vague," Choi said. "The people who will actually enforce this law are not the powerless — they are those who hold power."
He went on to say that ordinary people who claim their reporting has been distorted or fabricated cannot get their grievances covered by the press. "When people with power, authority and money use an ambiguous standard to label something disinformation and then pursue massive civil and criminal liability, it reaches the point of shutting news organizations down," he said.
Choi called the threat of fivefold punitive damages alone "a terrifying law capable of silencing free press criticism and criticism of power." He acknowledged that aggressive reporting or online posts damaging an individual's reputation or a company's legal interests pose a serious problem, but argued that suppression is not the answer. "Trying to repress everything unconditionally creates unintended and even more serious problems," he said.
He added that "when the party doing the suppressing is not an ordinary citizen but someone with power or wealth, the social influence and coercive force are far greater."
Choi said concerns about such regulation have already been raised abroad. Because foreign outlets cannot be penalized under the law, he said, the burden falls entirely on domestic companies. "A discriminatory structure emerges in which only domestic companies face regulation, and the United States is attacking the Network Act as a trade barrier," he said.
He added that in a polarized society, a particular faction can trigger mass reporting that forces platforms to remove content. "If the maximum damages are 500 million won ($323,000), applying the fivefold multiplier brings that to 2.5 billion won," he said. "A single news outlet, a single family, a single journalist cannot bear that."
Choi proposed media literacy as an alternative. "The international community recognizes that the benefits of a free press and free flow of information are far more valuable to the country as a whole, to businesses and to the innovation ecosystem," he said. "Building the capacity to understand from context what is manipulated and what is real is what will make society fundamentally more innovative."
He illustrated the point with examples of photographs easily distorted in news coverage. "A shot of a soldier giving water to a prisoner looks humanitarian; a shot of a gun pointed at the prisoner looks barbaric — but the full truth lies somewhere in between," he said. "The same facts take on entirely different meanings depending on the angle from which you view them."
Choi said the press is inherently engaged in framing, which means citizens must learn to read context. He recalled that during the 2021 debate over the Press Arbitration Act, he had proposed a standard under which news organizations would be exempt from liability if they promptly ran rebuttals and corrections — rather than imposing fivefold punitive damages or a muzzle.
"Once a reputation is destroyed, even fivefold damages rarely restore it," he said. "The most important thing is to catch it early and stop it from spreading."
Closing his remarks, Choi cited Yuval Noah Harari's "Nexus" and said the common pattern in the collapse of democracy is attacking a free press and undermining an independent judiciary. "How we protect those institutions is the responsibility of citizens and experts alike," he said, urging active adaptation to the new media and communications environment as the amended Network Act takes effect for the first time.
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