Families attacked online after the crash in South Korea

A Airplane crash in South Korea Last December left Park Gwen-Wo Sirak. The 22-year-old almost found a place to grieve his parents when he encounters a storm of online abuse, conspiracy and malicious jokes made for the victims.

The Jeju air aircraft, which was returning from Bangkok, Thailand, crashed at Muan International Airport on December 29 and erupted after being rammed into a concrete barrier at the end of the track, killing 179 of 181 people on board.

Police investigations have identified and detained eight people who have been accused of doing shameful and defamatory online posts. They included suggestions that families were “excited” to receive compensation from the authorities or that they were “false victims” – insofar as some feel forced to prove that they had lost their loved ones.

Authorities have downloaded at least 427 such positions.

But this is not the first time the affected families in South Korea have proven to be the goals of online abuse. Speaking to the BBC, experts have described a culture in which economic struggles, financial envy and social issues such as toxic competitiveness nourish the speech of hatred.

Following Seoul The Halloween crowd crushes in 2022.The victims and families of the victims were the same. A man who lost his son in the incident had brought his photo from hateful groups – showing him that he was laughing after receiving compensation.

People whose relatives died in the Sewol ferry, sinking in 2014, a maritime disaster that killed 304 people, mostly students – have also been targets of hate speech for years.

The tragedy saw that the government paid an average of 420 million wins ($ 292,840; 231,686 British pounds) per victim – triggering comments that claim that this figure was unjustifiably high.

“People who live every day think the compensation is overestimated and say that the victims are getting a” unfair attitude “and that they are doing a big deal when everyone’s life is difficult,” said COO Yong-WU, professor of sociology at Sungkyunkwan, to the News Site Herald.

In later comments on the BBC, Prof. Koo suggested that economic stress and the competitive labor market – especially after Covid – leave many people to feel socially isolated, exacerbating the speech of hate speech.

Many South Koreans, he says, “now” they look at others not as their peers, but as opponents, “pointing a widespread culture of comparison in South Korea.

“We tend to compare a lot … If you leave someone else, it’s easier to feel better,” he told the BBC. “Therefore, in Korea there is a little tendency to deal with hate speech or make shameful remarks, striving to reduce others to rise.”

The Park says that the families of the victims of the Jeju crash are characterized as “parasites that soak the nation’s money.”

As an example, he referred to a recent emergency auxiliary fund article of three million won (2,055; 1 632 British pounds), which was collected for the victims through donations. This article was welcomed with a deluge of malicious comments, many of which refers to the wrong proposal that taxpayers’ money was used for the fund.

“It seems that the victims of the victims at Muan airport have hit the jackpot. They must be secretly delighted,” said such a comment.

G -n Park says these comments were “prevalent”.

“Even if there is compensation for the accident, how can we feel as reckless to spend it when this is the cost of the lives of our loved ones?” He says. “Each of these comments cuts us deeply. We’re not here to make money.”

“Too many people, instead of being sensitive, to build their fun on the suffering of others,” he adds. “When something like this happens, they downplay him and send hateful remarks.”

Joshua Wyeng, a professor of psychology in the Philippines, who studies online hatred, says hatred is often “aimed at (those), which we believe are gaining some advantage at our expense.”

“We feel hate when (we think we) get the short end of the stick.”

In the case of Jeju’s air accident, political dynamics have only worsened things.

The incident came against the backdrop of a period of political turmoil in South Korea, with the country heading for the suspended shock decision of President Yon Suk Youol to accept a military situation – an incident that politically divided the country.

Many supporters of President Yone’s right -wing party for power without evidence have raised the blame for the crash of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP), pointing to the fact that the Muan airport was originally built as part of a political bet on the DP.

“The tragedy at the Muan Airport was created by the human disaster caused by DP,” read a comment on YouTube. Another described it as “100% of the party” of the party.

Han-Shin Park, whose brother died in the plane crash, says he was accused of a DP member and a “fake family member.” So vast were these allegations that his daughter gave up on social media to call them.

“It hurts deeply to see my father, who lost his brother in such a tragedy by labeled a” scammer. “It also bothers me that this misinformation could make my father make the wrong choice of despair,” she wrote on topics two days after the incident.

Han-Shin Park says he is stunned by how people seem to “enjoy the pain of others.”

“This is just not something that one has to do,” he told the BBC.

“I’m just an ordinary citizen. I’m not here to get into politics. I came to find out the truth about the death of my younger brother.”

Although there are no perfect hate solutions, experts say that social media companies need to establish policies for what is a hate speech and moderate content posted on their platforms respectively.

“Online users need to be able to report malicious publications and comments smoothly, and the companies platform need to actively delete such content,” says Prof. Quo. Law enforcement authorities must also take over the perpetrators of the task, he adds.

Reminding people of their shared identity can also help, says Prof. Wyeng.

“The fewer people think they are in opposite ends of a zero -sum game, the more they can feel that tragedies like these are all of us shared – and that the victims deserve empathy and compassion, not vitriol and condemnation.”