South Korean lawmaker fights government Twitter rules

Mar 25, 2010, 16:24 GMT

   Seoul - A South Korean politician took legal action Thursday against the government's regulation of the social networking service Twitter ahead of local elections set for June, denouncing the rules an attack on free speech.

   National Assembly Representative Chung Dong Young, who ran against President Lee Myung Bak in the 2007 polls, said he filed a petition challenging the constitutionality of an election law that allows the government to monitor and regulate the use of Twitter in campaigning.

   'Regulating Twitter would block our society's movement toward openness and strip people of the basic right of freedom of expression,' Chung, a member of the opposition Democratic Party, said in a press conference.

   Twitter has famously developed into a key means of communicating succinctly via the internet around the world, including in South Korea, where some 90 politicians use the microblogging service.

   Last month, South Korea's National Election Commission determined Twitter was a mode of communication that it could monitor. It said in its guidelines that the service was included in a ban on posting and distributing political 'notices, advertisements, photos, audio files and other information within the 180 days before the elections.'

   'Misinterpretation of the election law would limit freedom of expression,' Chung said.

   The election commission's monitoring of Twitter has emerged as a contentious social issue. Among those who have denounced the election watchdog's policy are major civic groups such as People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, and Twitter users who held a 'Twitter Voter Party' earlier this month in Seoul.

   'Twitter has become a convenient tool in this new media era,' human rights lawyer and civil activist Park Won Soon told the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper earlier this month.

   'The National Election Commission should change the existing regulations that are focused on a crackdown so that people can freely exchange their thoughts on pending issues.'

   A recent survey of South Korean lawyers and politicians conducted by a local newspaper reported that 65 per cent of respondents opposed the commission's regulations.