Being in South Korea some time now I learned that freedom isn’t the same everywhere. Of course everybody knows this. But it’s different experiencing it first hand. Working as a partner in the WCU project showed me some examples of this. However I will not go in detail about that.

What I do want to talk about are the upcoming local elections in South Korea. On June 2nd 2010 the local elections will take place. The thing is, as in all countries these elections have to be organized and regulated. In South Korea, the National Election Commission is responsible for this. But in South Korea regulations are quite strict. For instance, eight (sic) weeks before the elections no surveys and  polls are allows that make any mention of a party or candidate. So opinion polls are not allowed (I’m not sure that’s a bad thing though). In the words of the election committee:

From April 3, 2010 to the Election Day, no one is allowed to use names of certain parties and candidates when he or she conducts surveys on the local elections. This regulation aims to prevent parties and candidates’ tactful political activities to increase voters’ recognition of them by using surveys. However, polling companies or news media commissioned by parties and candidates are able to carry out surveys with some limits: Not allowed 1) to use the name of parties and candidates and 2) to deal with contents considered as election campaigns.

Well, eight weeks is quite a long time. More reasonable would be three or four weeks, in my opinion. The official campaign starts only two weeks prior to the elections.

Not only that, Twitter – my favorite research topic these last months – has entered the political arena in South Korea as well. Candidates are stimulated to start using it by their political parties. Read this article. Unfortunately, that is, for the candidates the South Korean election commission does not approve.They’ll monitor Twitter activities closely. So close that they’ll subscribe to candidates’ Tweeting with their own Twitter username nec3939. I wonder what the 3939 stands for. I’d be interesting to follow which candidates refuses the NEC as a follower. Also, what would the consequences be if they did. For now the NEC has more followers than they follow themselves.

At the same time, the election commission has reached an agreement with online journalists about election reporting in the campaign:

As the 5^th Nationwide Local Elections is nearing, the NEC hosted a signing ceremony of agreement for the clean online election culture with online journalism associations and companies on April 21, 2010. In the ceremony, ten representatives of online journalism associations and online portal companies attended. The NEC entered into an agreement with them about the following cooperation for: 1) objective and impartial reporting on platforms of parties and candidates, 2) proper action to unlawful notices and information related to elections and 3) creating sound cyber election culture to encourage netizens’ political participation.

You’d expect that this would happen without having to sign an agreement. OK I don’t think it’s possible to have complete impartial reporting. But then again who would want bland reporting.

On a positive note, the South Korean election commission knows how to stimulate people to get out and vote. See this pop-up of the English page. Agreed? This looks nicer than the Dutch election commission.

Restrictions also apply to the use of YouTube. All websites that have more than 100.000 subscribers are to have are to use a real-name verification system to monitor comments and uploaded video’s. So, Google’s YouTube was also subject to this regulation. But Google that thinks freedom of expression on the Internet is very important decided to limit comment and upload functionality on the South Korean YouTube. By doing so Google does not need to implement the real-name verification system. At the same time it’s very easy to subscribe to the American YouTube in doing so circumventing the rules. But who can blame them. And not all South Koreans agree with these regulations: see this article. This raises the question what it’s for, these regulations. Regulations are only effective when there is a likely chance to be punished when violating them. If not, they’re useless.

In my opinion, it’s the beginning of the end. And let’s be honest, a free and democratic country should not enforce these type of regulations. I’ll probably will be dismissed being a Westerner to have this opinion. Maybe so, but then again …. so what. Mark my words, it’s just a matter time.

OK, one final example: try to visit a North Korean website when in South Korea. For instance this one www.korea-dpr.com or this one www.kcna.co.jp (note the .com and .jp domain extensions). Outside South Korea you’ll be able to see them. But visiting the sites from South Korea, you’ll see this. OK, my Korean language skills are still not great but this page sends a clear message: DON’T GO THERE.

In my research on politicians’  use of Twitter, I came across these widgets showing live updates of MPs tweeting throughout the day. To me these are a quick way (although not always reliable) to collect the usernames of tweeting politician.

Here are some links to pages aggregating political tweets:
Tweetcongress is a basic page showing who in the US congress is tweeting, how often and what about.

Kamertweets is a Dutch version also showing basic data. It let’s you embed the latest tweets on your own webpage:

Then there is of course the British Tweetminster. This seems to be, of these three, the most elaborate one. Not only does Tweetminster provide the basic data. It allows you to use html-code to embed tweets onto your page, as you can see below:

Not only that, they also provide html-code to embed the Tweetometer (a spin-off of the famous Swingometer in the UK):

This is all nice, and although these widgets were not intended for analysis purposes, it would be very nice to see some more elaborate analysis of the role Twitter plays in political communication. Here at Yeungnam University’s WCU Webometrics Institute, we are developing a number of tools that allows us to collect and visualize data (yes yes shameless self promotion). Analysis takes place with regular software tools (SPSS, Pajek, Ucinet). Papers are coming available soon at a conference near you.

2009 and 2010 are exciting years to study the Internet. Anyway, I think so. Some of you may know my academic life revolves around micro-blogging these last months and the coming ones as well. The reason is that Twitter is becoming more and more popular amongst politicians. Not only that, in 2009 we had the European parliament elections where Twitter was used by some of the candidates. In 2010 we had the local elections in the Netherlands. Some two weeks before that we (i.e. the Dutch) had a governmental meltdown: the social democratic party (PvdA) decided to quit the government. Therefore, we also have general elections on June 9th. And then there is South Korea, where on June 2nd, there are local elections. Oh yes, the UK has general elections as well: Gordon Brown has to set a date that is before June 3rd.

As for South Korea, some interesting thongs are happening here. Apparently the political parties are stepping up their online campaign activities, according this newspaper article.The Grand National Party handed out smart-phones to national assembly members and candidates, hoping they will pick up text-messaging and Twitter to connect to the public. The Democratic Party also stepped up their online activities, creating a network party. These effort can be necessary. I learned that politicians in South Korea have a considerable

The Korean Election Committee however seems to have some problems with these increasing online political activities. To ensure fairness in election campaigning several regulations apply. Striving for fairness in campaigning is of course essential. At the same it seems quite impossible to banish Twitter or other kinds of micro-blogging services (let’s not forget there are other ones besides Twitter, such as Me2day, Plurk and Renren). First of all, micro-blogging is sort of an informal way of disseminating information. It’s low profile, no dressed up website, but merely short texts. At the same time the messages are only actively targeted to those that explicitly subscribed to the Tweets of the candidate. These are the ones that are already interested in politics in general and the candidate in particular. These probably will need little convincing to vote for the candidate as it is. Furthermore, the question is to what extent the Tweets are actually campaigning messages or merely chitchat. Tweeting about daily issues (enjoying your coffee, being stuck in traffic) doesn’t look like political campaigning. That is, political campaigning in the strictest sense. For some time now, politicians, at least in western countries increasingly personalize their campaigns, presenting themselves as mortals having the same problems other people also have. By doing so they hope, is their guess, they appear as normal people made of flesh and blood and hopefully more likable. This in turn should ultimately lead to more votes in the elections. The jury’s verdict on that is still out.

Just recently, David Nieborg (University of Amsterdam), guest in the radio show Tros Radio Online, said that the new social-democratic party leader Job Cohen (the former leader Wouter Bos resigned two weeks after the local elections and 12 weeks prior to the general elections)  should start using Twitter. He predicted this could lead to four more seats in parliament. Well, I’m not that sure. Twitter is not online a micro-blogging service, but also a social-network site. A characteristic of a social network is homophily: people that are similar tend to form a social network. So what happens is that politicians using twitter are primarily preaching to the converted instead of the disbelievers. However, the disbelievers is where the electoral gain is to be expected. So, the effectiveness of Twitter and other social network sites as campaigning tools for more electoral gain is expected to be limited. However, the final verdict is to be passed by empirical research.