[2020 National Audit] Will Portal News Arrangement Bias Be Questioned at the Ministry of Science and ICT Audit?

Opposition Lawmakers Criticize Bias in Portal News Editing and Search

On the 8th of last month, at the National Assembly plenary session, Yoon Young-chan, a member of the Democratic Party of Korea, was exchanging messenger conversations with someone regarding the news of the floor leader Joo Ho-young of the People Power Party's negotiation group representative speech published on KakaoTalk News.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] The issue of news arrangement algorithms of domestic portals is expected to come under scrutiny at the National Assembly's Science, Technology, Information and Broadcasting Communications Committee's audit scheduled for the 7th. However, the heads of the two major portals, Naver and Kakao, are unlikely to attend the audit as witnesses.

Members of the People Power Party have long raised concerns about the bias in news editing by portals and insisted that the heads of domestic portals be summoned as witnesses for the audit. However, the attendance of the portal heads was canceled as no agreement was reached between the ruling and opposition parties.

Earlier, on the 8th of last month, a controversy over biased news editing arose when messages exchanged between Democratic Party lawmaker Yoon Young-chan, a former Naver vice president, and his aides were captured by a photojournalist's camera. At the time, Lawmaker Yoon sent messages to his aides criticizing the news editing of the portal Daum, saying, "Strongly protest to Kakao," and "Tell them to come in."

In response, opposition lawmakers including Park Sung-joong, the People Power Party's secretary of the Science and Technology Committee, issued a statement criticizing, "This incident revealed why the Blue House sent Lawmaker Yoon to the National Assembly," and added, "There have been widespread rumors that the Blue House and the ruling party have controlled the portals, and this incident has brought the issue to light."

As the controversy grew, Kakao explained, "News is edited by artificial intelligence (AI), so there is absolutely no arbitrary human intervention."

Recently, some in the opposition have also pointed out that when searching for 'Choo Mi-ae' on Naver's mobile application, the 'tab order' displayed at the top differs from that of other politicians, and that when searching with the English keyboard, the automatic conversion result does not appear immediately.

Regarding this, Naver explained, "An error occurred in preference aggregation due to spaces included during the search term input process," and added, "Even with the same search keyword, search patterns differ between mobile and PC environments, so search results may vary."

Meanwhile, on the previous day, Lawmaker Park and others again urged that the heads of Naver and Kakao appear as witnesses at the audit. People Power Party lawmakers from the Science and Technology Committee, including Park Dae-chul, Kim Young-sik, Jung Hee-yong, Cho Myung-hee, Heo Eun-ah, and Hwang Bo-seung-hee, issued a statement saying, "Portal heads who do not keep their promises made at the audit must come to the audit and explain directly."

These lawmakers claimed that Lee Hae-jin, Naver's Global Investment Officer (GIO), did not keep his promise when he appeared at the 2017 audit. At that time, Lee GIO mentioned that "the news editing function would be placed externally and subjected to public verification," and that "the News Editing Advisory Committee would undergo external verification," but these promises were not fulfilled.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.