• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.1825-1844
• /
• 2019

Political campaigns circulate manipulative opinions in online communities to implant false beliefs and eventually win elections. Not only is this type of manipulation unfair, it also has long-lasting negative impacts on people's lives. Existing tools detect political manipulation based on a supervised classifier, which is accurate when trained with large labeled data. However, preparing this data becomes an excessive burden and must be repeated often to reflect changing manipulation tactics. We propose a practical detection system that requires moderate groundwork to achieve a sufficient level of accuracy. The proposed system groups opinions with similar properties into clusters, and then labels a few opinions from each cluster to build a classifier. It also models each opinion with features deduced from raw data with no additional processing. To validate the system, we collected over a million opinions during three nation-wide campaigns in South Korea. The system reduced groundwork from 200K to nearly 200 labeling tasks, and correctly identified over 90% of manipulative opinions. The system also effectively identified transitions in manipulative tactics over time. We suggest that online communities perform periodic audits using the proposed system to highlight manipulative opinions and emerging tactics.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.33-48
• /
• 2019

The current Moon Jai-in administration in South Korea is facing serious challenges as a result of a scandal involving the manipulation of news online. Staff in Moon's camp are suspected of manipulating public opinion by creating millions of fake news comments online, contributing to Moon being elected president. This South Korean political scandal raises a number of theoretical issues with regard to new platform technologies and media manipulation. First, the incident exposes the technological limits of blocking manipulation of the news, partly because of the nature of social media and partly because of the nature of contemporary technology. Contemporary social media is often monopolistic in nature; with the majority of people are using the same platforms, and hence it is likely that they will be subject to forms of media manipulation. Second, the Korean case of news manipulation demonstrates a unique cultural aspect of Korean society. News comments and readers' replies have become a major channel of alternative news in Korea. This phenomenon is often designated as "reply journalism," since people are interested in reading the news replies of ordinary readers equally to reading news reports themselves. News replies are considered indicators of public opinion and are seen as affecting trias politica in Korean society. Third, the Korean incident of news manipulation implicates a new form of populism in the 21st century and the nature of democratic participation. This article aims to explicate key issues in media manipulation by including wider technological, cultural, and political aspects in the South Korean news media context.

• East Asian Economic Review
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.243-260
• /
• 2013

The dominant academic literature about trade agreements maintains that they are only about national terms-of-trade manipulation and not at all about purely political concerns. Non-academic economists, commentators, and diplomats by contrast think that trade agreements are all about political concerns. There are two substantive and important distinctions between the two views. i Practitioners maintain that policymakers care virtually not at all about the terms of trade or about trade-tax revenue. ii Practitioners, unlike academics, maintain that trade-agreement negotiations themselves change the underlying political economy. Observation of actual trade policy measures, though not conclusive, suggests that the practitioners are right and that the academics are wrong.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.23 no.6
• /
• pp.75-79
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to introspect again the role of the criminal law at a time when it is said that numerous criminal and legal discussions are needed to develop the so called "reply manipulation " case that is shaking the nation's political history. The research method considered the literature and precedents discussed in the past, and discussed the issue of subculture abuse caused by the internet, which is a product of convenience and affluence that came with the Forth industrial revolution through criminal law. Through a computer program, a discussion was held on what penalties would be imposed on the criminal law for attempting to manipulate public opinion by manipulating the so-called number of comments or Reaction. Question of whether the criminal law should further emphasize the need for a discussion on the need for a method to strengthen the preventive functions of the criminal law and expand the scope of punishment in order to address new causes of risk that came with the development of science. Without reflecting on whether such as "government-inspired demonstration "would be possible in today's world that was in the public perception of the authoritarian government of the past, it is a problem to see that the political goals of a particular group can be achieved by manipulating comments or creating public opinion on the Internet. The duty of criminal law is to protect the interests of the law. The role of the criminal law should be maintained the self limiting as far as possible in cases of violation or danger of the law. Still, it is a problem that the role of the criminal justice system today is too aggressive and is seen as a top tool rather than a last resort for solving problems. he role of the internet will be expanded further in the Hyper Connected society. To solve these problems, we should look forward to a change in the priority of other laws and policies other than criminal law.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
• /
• v.21 no.6
• /
• pp.57-69
• /
• 2020

As more people share their opinions in online communities, such as Internet portals and social networking services, more opinions are manipulated for the benefit of particular individuals and groups. In particular, when manipulations occur for political purposes, they influence election results as well as government policies and the quality of life. This type of manipulation has targeted the general public, and their analysis and detection has also focused on such manipulation. However, to more efficiently spread propaganda, recent manipulations have targeted common interest groups(e.g., a group of those interested in real estate) and propagated information whose content and style are customized to those groups. This work characterizes such manipulations on common interest groups and proposes method to detect manipulations. To this end, we collected and analyzed opinions posted on 10 common interest groups before and after an election. As a result, we found that manipulations on common interest groups indeed occurred and were gradually increasing toward the election date. We also proposed a detection system that examines individual opinions, their authors, and their collaborators. Using the collected opinions, we demonstrated that the proposed system can accurately classify more than 90% of manipulated opinions and that many of these opinions were posted by multiple collaborators. We believe that regular audits of opinions using the proposed system can quickly isolate manipulations and decrease their impact. Moreover, the proposed features can be used to identify manipulations in domains other than politics.

• Iberoamérica
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.123-152
• /
• 2011

The long standing people's culture of Latin America based on social solidarity of the communities makes the political relations between the leader and the people very different from them of the european societies based on the representative democracy. At any rate, the main stream of the Populist Discourses sees the real populist political processes with the pejorative senses attributing the demagogue style of the leaders. In these sense, it is very important to re-consider the populism discourses of Ernesto Laclau who thinks that the populism is a way of interpreting the emergence of the people to establish the social demands in the context of populist real politics. According to Laclau, "the populism seeks for the radical reconfiguration of the revolt of the 'Status Quo' and new order". This work will confirm if this interpretation of Laclau can be applied to Peronist political regime. Meanwhile the first group of the orthodox line of the discourses on populism including Gino Germani shows that the populism is a political movement based on the manipulation and demagogue by the charismatic leader of the irrational mass during the period in transition after the crises of the traditional oligarchy in Latin America. And another line of the main stream of discourses on populism including Cardoso and O'Donnell says that the populism is a political phenomena in a period of transition towards the modernization and the national development by means of the industrialization through the substitution of the imports and the alliance between the classes after the 1930's. But these principal interpretations on populism disregards that in Argentina many urban poor working class people had lived under the racist, unequal painful social relations due to the underestimation and the discrimination by the upper and the middle class with many intellectuals. But Peronism had considered them as the new social subjects with human dignities. And so we have to rethink the clientelism also with another meanings. In this sense, the theories of Ernesto Laclau on populism is very helpful to illuminate the sensitive and ambiguous meanings of Peronism. Especially Peronism makes the urban working class maintain their life styles more tended to them of the traditional communities and go towards the anti-Status Quo. That is a key of success of Peronism not only that time but until these days. And so this study will show that it is the most important thing that Peronist regime had made the emergence of the 'people' in the meaning of advancing the democracy in Argentina.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
• /
• v.33 no.3
• /
• pp.163-209
• /
• 2011

This study empirically analyzes whether political rent-seeking behavior exits in Korea. The empirical analysis shows that there is a cyclical decline in aggregate revenue immediately following the election year. However, when using other aggregate fiscal variables including aggregate revenue, fiscal balance, tax and public burden ratio, no such cyclical deterioration are found. By sector, the expenditures of the economic affairs show a cyclical increase in the year right after the election. In addition, as the ratio of ruling party senators to total senators is high, the expenditures of the economic affairs tend to increase more and this tendency becomes more stronger right after the presidential election year. Such a result turns out to be consistent even when the expenditure was analyzed separately from the mandatory and discretionary expenditures by sector. This is a testimony to the existence of political rent-seeking behavior in Korea.

• SUVANNABHUMI
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.25-46
• /
• 2011

The state-sangha relations in the countries of Theravada Buddhism has often been described as a mutually dependent patron-client relation in which the state and the sangha support each other by performing their due roles. Yet this theory involves a normative dimension that prescribes such a relation as the ideal in the Buddhist world. The explanatory power of this theory hence is hampered in a country where the ideal is not fully realized. In the wake of tumultuous political upheaval where political rivals vie for the state the ideal as well as the theory are put into a trial. The tragic history of modern Cambodia is a history of ceaseless conflict in which multiple contenders for the state had to define their relations with the sangha. The relations defined turned out less mutual than supposed. The state-sangha relations were rather unilaterally dependent. More often than not the sangha was subject to state control with no power to confront the state or coopted only to become a tool for political propaganda and manipulation. The sangha always played the role of client, waiting for the state to define the relation and to be benevolent. Even when the monks were forced to disrobe and when the sangha itself was annihilated, all they did was to wait for another patron state that would put the sangha back in place. The state-sangha relations the Cambodian history reveals were not close to one in which the two parties benefit each other on an equal basis. It was a patron-client relationship in which the client sangha had to be heavily dependent on the patron state. Such a unilaterally dependent relationship is the one that has prevailed in Cambodia.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.29-39
• /
• 2020

Online communities, such as Internet portal sites and social media, have become popular since they allow users to share opinions and to obtain information anytime, anywhere. Accordingly, an increasing number of opinions are manipulated to the advantage of particular groups or individuals, and these opinions include falsified product reviews and political propaganda. Existing detection systems are built upon the characteristics of manipulated opinions for one particular time period. However, manipulation tactics change over time to evade detection systems and to more efficiently spread information, so detection systems should also evolve according to the changes. We therefore propose a system that helps observe and trace changes in manipulation tactics. This system classifies opinions into clusters that represent different tactics, and changes in these clusters reveal evolving tactics. We evaluated the system with over a million opinions collected during three election campaigns and found various changes in (i) the times when manipulations frequently occur, (ii) the methods to manipulate recommendation counts, and (iii) the use of multiple user IDs. We suggest that the operators of online communities perform regular audits with the proposed system to identify evolutions and to adjust detection systems.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.287-309
• /
• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to critique British imperialism in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (1991) by analyzing the partition of India from the perspective of nation, religion, and women. Dubbed "Punjabi-Parsi-Indian-Pakistani," Sidhwa is in a position where she can view the partition from an objective and neutralized stance. Rather than focusing on the lives of nationally well-known political figures such as Gandhi, Nehru, or Jinnah, Sidhwa delves deep into the miserable lives of the lower classes before and after the partition. First, I analyze the process of the partition, as it is performed through the manipulation of British imperialism. By adopting the viewpoint of an 8-year-old Lenny, who is the daughter of a Parsi family, Sidhwa is able to critique both British imperialism as well as the male-dominated Indian society where the treatment of women is unthinkably harsh. Second, I focus on the tragedy of the confrontation of three religions, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. Religious people fight each other while they were forced to move from South to North or from North to South. I argue that the religious conflicts have much to do with political issues. Third, I want to argue that women are the major victims of the partition. Ayah, Hamida, and Papoo are victims of male-dominated India during the partition. They symbolize the feminized India, which is exploited and victimized by British Imperialism. Even though Ayah is shattered by Ice-candy-man while working as a prostitute and dancer, she decides to return to her home in India, which shows her challenge against male-dominated India as well as against British colonialism. In conclusion, Sidhwa tries to heal the suffering of the Indian women who fell victim to male-dominated Indian society by criticizing the problems of British imperialism. In addition, by dealing with the lives of silenced people, Sidhwa asks readers not to forget the historical tragedy and not to repeat the tragedy again.