Families attacked online after South Korea’s plane crash

TO South Korea plane crash An orphan was left from Park Guen-Woo. The 22 -year -old had barely found space to cry to his parents when he met a torrent of online abuse, conspiracies and malicious jokes about the victims.

Jeju Air’s plane, which was returning from Bangkok, Thailand, landed at Muan International Airport on December 29 and exploded after hitting a concrete barrier at the end of the track, killing 179 of the 181 people on board.

Police investigations have identified and detained eight people who have been accused of making derogatory and defamatory lines. These included suggestions that families were “excited” to receive compensation from the authorities, or that they were “false victims”, to the extent that some felt forced to prove that they had lost their loved ones.

The authorities have eliminated at least 427 of these positions.

But this is not the first time that the afflicted families in South Korea are the objectives of online abuse. In statements to the BBC, experts described a culture where economic struggles, financial envy and social problems, such as toxic competitiveness, are feeding hate discourse.

After Seoul’s Crush of the multitude of Halloween in 2022The victims and the afflicted families were stained similarly. A man who lost his son in the incident had his photo manipulated by hate groups, showing him laughing after receiving compensation.

People whose loved ones died in the Sewol ferry sinking in 2014, a maritime disaster that saw 304 people killed, mostly schoolchildren, have also been for years for years the hate speech.

The tragedy saw the Government pay an average of 420 million wones ($ 292,840; £ 231,686) per victim, which caused comments that claimed that this figure was unreasonably high.

“People who live day by day feel that compensation is overvalued and say that the afflicted are receiving an” unfair treatment “and that they are doing a big problem when everyone’s life is difficult,” said Koo Jeong-Woo, professor of sociology at Sungkyunkwan University, told The Korea Herald news site.

In comments subsequent to the BBC, Professor Koo suggested that economic stress and a competitive labor market, particularly following Covid, have left many people feeling socially isolated, exacerbating the issue of hate discourse.

Many South Koreans, he says, now “come to others not as their peers, but as adversaries,” pointing a generalized culture of comparison in South Korea.

“We tend to compare a lot … if you leave someone else, it’s easier to feel superior,” he told the BBC. “That is why there is a little trend in Korea to participate in hate speech or make derogatory comments, with the aim of decreasing others to rise.”

Park says that the families of Jeju’s air shock victims have been characterized as “parasites that waste the money of the nation.”

As an example, it refers to a recent article on an emergency aid fund of three million Wones ($ 2,055; £ 1,632) that was collected for duel through donations. That article was received with an avalanche of malicious comments, many referring to the erroneous suggestion that taxpayers’ money was used for the bottom.

“It seems that the families of the victims of the Muan airport have reached the fat prize. They must be secretly delighted,” said one of those comments.

Park says these comments were “overwhelming.”

“Even if compensation for the accident enters, how could we feel that it will spend it recklessly when it is the price of the life of our loved ones?” He says. “Each of those comments cuts us deeply. We are not here to earn money.”

“Too many people, instead of being sensitive, build their entertainment in the suffering of others,” he adds. “When something like this happens, they despise and throw hateful comments.”

Joshua Uyheng, professor of psychology in the Philippines who studies online hatred, says that hate of often “directed towards (those) that we believe are gaining an advantage at our expense.”

“We feel hate when (we believe that we) we are obtaining the short end of the stick.”

In the case of Jeju’s plane crash, political dynamics only worsened things.

The accident occurred in the midst of a period of political agitation in South Korea, with the country staggering from the surprise suspended decision of President Yoon Suk Yeol to promulgate the martial law, an incident that politically divided the country.

Many supporters of the Power Party of President Yoon’s right -wing, without evidence, have inspired the accident of the Democratic Party (DP) of the main opposition, pointing out the fact that Muan’s airport was originally built as part of a political promise by the DP.

“The tragedy of the Muan airport is a disaster caused by man caused by the DP,” reads a comment on YouTube. Another described it as “100% guilt” of the party.

Park Han-Shin, whose brother died in the plane crash, says he has been accused of being a member of the DP and “member of the false duel family.” So extensive were these statements that his daughter went to social networks to call them.

“It hurts deeply to see my father, who lost his brother in such a tragedy, being labeled as a” scammer. “I am also worried that this wrong information can lead my father to make wrong decisions for despair,” he wrote in threads two days after the incident.

Park Han-Shin says they are surprised by how people seem to “enjoy taking advantage of the pain of others.”

“That is simply not something that a human being should do,” he told the BBC.

“I am just a common citizen. I am not here to enter politics. I came to discover the truth about the death of my younger brother.”

While there are no perfect solutions for hatred, experts say that social media companies should establish policies on what constitutes hate discourse and moderate content published on their platforms accordingly.

“Online users must inform malicious publications and comments without problems, and platform companies must actively eliminate such content,” says Professor Koo. The law enforcement agencies must also take perpetrators to the task, he adds.

Remembering people their shared identities can also help, says Professor Uyheng.

“The less people feel that they are at the opposite extremes of a zero -sum game, perhaps the more they can feel that tragedies like these are the shared concern of all of us, and that the victims deserve empathy and compassion, not vitriol and condemnation.”