Broadcaster Kim Eo-jun. [Yonhap]
Broadcaster Kim Eo-jun. [Yonhap]

Pro-government broadcaster Kim Eo-jun said President Lee Jae Myung has been "trapped in an algorithm prison" through his use of social media.

Speaking Monday on his YouTube program "Kim Eo-jun's Humility Is Hard News Factory," Kim said coordinated online operations designed to lock politicians inside algorithmic echo chambers had grown increasingly sophisticated over the past several years. While the recommendation algorithm on X, formerly Twitter, cannot be directly manipulated, he said, the inputs that feed it can be.

Kim said a network of fake accounts could flood specific posts with likes and retweets and follow a politician's account, causing content of a particular ideological bent to dominate the top of that politician's feed. "Politicians are easy targets for this kind of operation," he said, adding that President Lee had recently become the primary focus of such efforts.

Kim called on the president's office to have an IT specialist log in to Lee's account and conduct a full audit of the accounts appearing at the top of his feed. He said accounts that had posted criticism of "Munjoteollaeyu" would almost certainly make up the majority of those top-ranked accounts.

"They occasionally post perfectly normal content in between," Kim said. "When the president retweets that, he walks right into the trap. Those posts are not written by individuals — a team leader writes them separately and puts them up."

He then referenced a recent incident in which President Lee quoted a post from a specific account on X before deleting it.

"The whole point of the operation is to make people think, 'He deliberately picked that account to retweet,' or 'There's no way the president didn't know what he was doing,'" Kim said.

He added that if the president's aides logged in and looked at the top of his feed, "99 percent of those posts will be hiding there," and said he was certain Lee had become a target of such an operation.

Kim said the algorithm prison campaign targeting President Lee had been running for a long time, and that most major politicians were now targets. "Lee is the most serious case," he said, adding that former Democratic Party leader Lee Nak-yon was the most prominent example of a politician who had been trapped in such a system and "completely radicalized" as a result.

Kim addressed the president directly, saying, "You want to retweet posts that seem to understand you and take comfort in them — but those are the very traps that have been laid for you."

"If the president's approval rating had more room to spare, it wouldn't matter," Kim said. "But that's no longer the case. He needs to stop retweeting."


min3654@heraldcorp.com