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In a continuing trend of government agencies having no idea how humour on Twitter works, a South Korean activist was arrested last week for ironically retweeting the North Korean government.
Jung-geun Park was charged under a South Korean policy called the National Security Law that bans nebulously-defined “acts that benefit the enemy.” Except he was actually making fun of the enemy. That’s him imposing his face and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label on a North Korean propaganda poster.
Funny and preposterous as it may be, this incident also comes with a darker overtone: the National Security Law has in the past been used as a hammer to crush political dissidents. When the government has leeway to make “aiding the enemy” mean anything it wants it to mean, it’s easy to twist the actions of a a political annoyance into something more sinister and tortureable. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that over a misinterpreted Kim Jong-un Nyan Cat tweet. [New York Times via BoingBoing]
Original Image Credit: Park Jung-geun / New York Times
So basically this story is: a country, under constant threat from its neighbour who has the ability to launch a nuclear attack on you, has actually launched missile attacks recently killing a number of your citizens, and has regularly breached the terms of the armistice agreement in ways that could easily be seen as aggressive and war-enducing, whilst being situated along one of the biggest demilitarised zones in the world, doesn’t laugh at the fact that one of their citiznes tweeted ‘funny’ mock propaganda from their closest, most dangerous enemy, in an attempt at humour which broke a laws of that country. Shame on them!
You may not agree with the law, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, and as I was told at my work’s mandatory “diversity training” – according to the rules and regulations in the UK, it doesn’t matter how a joke or comment is intended, it is how it is received that matters.
Oh come on, you can’t seriously be defending this action? Any security agency that uses twitter as its information source deserves to be mocked, and we have to mock them until this behaviour stops, because it does nothing but harm ordinary peace-loving folk. What kind of terrorist posts their secret plans on a global, public, widely accessible website?
And just because a law exists doesn’t mean one can’t – and in some cases shouldn’t – disagree with it.
As I state above – you are entitled to disagree with a law, but that doesn’t protect you from prosecution under that law if you break it. You can’t steal simply because you disagree with that law.
And even if the authorities are being overly cautious and overzealous in arresting him, it is hardly surprising that they would at least investigate activities that are against the law.
And as for being terrorism – at no point do I raise that, and neither does the article – it as about propaganda not terrorism, which technically his retweets were even if they were meant in a ‘humourous’ manner. Besides, we all know crime can be helped by social networking – potential links between London riots & various social network activities is a clear example of that.