Seoul to block North Korea’s twitter account
From The Chosun Ilbo:
The Korea Communications Standards Commission on Thursday decided to block access to North Korea’s Twitter account.
The commission concluded that Uriminzok tweets are illegal under the decades-old National Security Law because they “praise, encourage sympathy for, publicize, or support the North Korean regime’s activities.”
The Korea Communications Commission had asked the KCSC to review the issue at the request of the National Intelligence Service and the police.
“Some people claim that it’s not possible to apply domestic law on grounds that North Korea’s Twitter account uses an overseas server,” a KCSC spokesman said. “But they’re wrong because the account will only be blocked domestically, not overseas.”
Critics say censorship is unlikely to be effective. Even if South Korean users are banned from accessing the Uriminzok on Twitter, contents could spread in real time through overseas users if they retweet North Korean Twitter’s postings.
If I had a penny eveytime I read or heard about North Korea and China’s manipulative filtering of the internet, I’d have a lot of pennies.
Yet when South Korea decides to do it we don’t hear a squeak. There are a few websites we can’t access over here and sometimes it pisses me off. Korea considers itself a modern country successfully living in the free world. But how can that be even remotely true when they decided to control what their people can and cannot see?
Okay, I realise it is no where near as severe as China and N. Korea but it still implies a less than free thinking country.
