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But Ilbe still represents the political fringes of South Korean society. But today, Ilbe has a sizable audience: In August, it had nearly 30.8 million visits and was the 24th most popular website in all of South Korea, according to SimilarWeb. Neither do they know how much revenue the site’s ads, many of which feature anime porn, bring in. “That’s the origin of Ilbe.” They hate the political left, women’s rights, the LGBT community, immigrants and anyone they can consider “pro-North Korea.”Įxperts know very little about UBH Corp., the mysterious registered owner of Ilbe. “They talked about everything - politics, misogynistic things,” he said through a translator. Kim has interviewed several Ilbe members and analyzed at least 330,000 of their posts. Ilbe’s base community was already hanging out in an online baseball subgroup on a popular Korean comedy forum called DC Inside, according to Hakjoon Kim, a data analyst in Seoul. Ilbe translates to “daily best.” It started around 2009 as a storehouse for abusive content that might’ve gotten deleted on other sites. Those opinions are fairly cut and dry: They hate the political left, women’s rights, the LGBT community, immigrants and anyone they can consider “pro-North Korea.” They couldn’t find their place in Korean society, but the internet is a place where culturally and morally marginal people can talk about their opinions.” “Ilbe is culturally marginal but also morally marginal. “ a complex social phenomenon with many causes,” Wonjae Lee, a professor at the KAIST Graduate School of Culture and Technology in Seoul, said by phone. Sound familiar? For Ilbe’s angry young men, “misogyny is their biggest stance” It has risen to prominence in the backdrop of South Korea’s turbulent recent history - deep political divides, a youth unemployment crisis and backlash against liberal social values. Welcome to the site Ilbe Storehouse, better known as just Ilbe, the hub for South Korea’s new far-right movement.
And like in the U.S., their influence has grown rapidly in just a few short years. They congregate in an anonymous, 4chan-esque web forum where they can rant without social repercussions. it’s a loose group of mostly digitally savvy, ultra-right-wing South Korean men.
They’re known for a “ deep-seated misogyny” and a hatred of immigrants and sexual minorities, and they’re waging an online war on the political left - a group they call, simply, “ commies.”īut this isn’t the white supremacist “alt-right” of the U.S. Ilbe users are the kind of people who refer to Korean women as “ kimchi bitches.” They call Chinese people “ cockroaches” and homosexual men “ gay bastards.” They’re the trolls who binge-ate pizza to taunt a father on a hunger strike after he lost his child in a ferry accident that killed 325 high school students and teachers - or the ones who defaced memorial posters for the victims.