Supreme Court: Simple Twitter 'Retweets' or Facebook Shares of Political Articles or Posts Are Not Election Campaigning

Teacher Acquitted for Sharing Political Articles and Posts on SNS Ahead of General Election Confirmed

Supreme Court Grand Chamber. / Photo by Joint Press Corps

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Seok-jin] The Supreme Court has ruled that simply sharing political articles or others' posts on social networking services (SNS) such as Twitter or Facebook cannot be considered election campaigning.

The Supreme Court's 2nd Division (Presiding Justice Park Sang-ok) announced on the 7th that it dismissed the prosecutor's appeal and upheld the lower court's acquittal in the final appeal of high school teacher A, who was indicted for violating the Public Official Election Act.

The court stated, "Regarding the charges in this case, there is no violation of the limits of free evaluation of evidence by wrongly recognizing facts or misunderstanding the legal principles of 'election campaigning' under the Public Official Election Act, in violation of logic and the rules of experience."

A, a teacher at a high school in Jindo-gun, Jeollanam-do, and the head of the Jindo branch of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, was prosecuted for conducting election campaigning prohibited for public officials by retweeting political articles or posts on others' Twitter accounts 58 times over about a month from March 11 to April 12, 2016, just before the 20th National Assembly election.

The first trial court found A guilty on 11 counts, including posts criticizing Park Ji-won, who left the Democratic Party to join the founding of the People's Party, and posts appealing support for Lee Hae-chan, who left the same party and declared candidacy as an independent in Sejong Special Self-Governing City, and Kim Kwang-jin, a candidate in the Democratic Party's Suncheon primary. However, considering the offenses were not severe, the court suspended a fine of 500,000 won.

On the other hand, the second trial court, citing the Supreme Court precedent that whether an act constitutes election campaigning under the Public Official Election Act should be judged objectively based on the act displayed externally rather than the intent of the actor, acquitted A on all 11 counts that were found guilty in the first trial.

The second trial court explained, "Based solely on the evidence submitted by the prosecutor, it is difficult to conclude that the defendant's posting of each of the above posts objectively shows an active and planned intent to promote the election or defeat of a specific candidate or party beyond simple political opinion expression or declaration related to the election."

It was also taken into consideration that A's Twitter serves not only as a social space for communication with other users but also as a private space for sharing and recording personal daily life and emotions, and that most of the posts were simple retweets of news articles or posts written by others without adding A's own opinions.

Furthermore, A's Twitter followers were estimated to be only a few dozen, and although the posts on Twitter were automatically sent to the linked Facebook timeline, where about 700 Facebook friends could see them, the court judged that since each recipient had to voluntarily click to view the posts, A's actions could not be regarded as active and planned election campaigning.

The Supreme Court agreed with the second trial court's judgment.

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