When someone runs afoul of popular opinion in South Korea, they risk being the target of nasty online campaigns, which apparently have led to some suicides. A movement has started to push civility.When German-born fashion journalist Vera Hohleiter poked fun in print at the smell of kimchi and the short skirts of South Korean women, the cyber response was swift and nasty.Incensed Seoul Internet users flooded her blog with insults, calling her a racist and a Nazi, and demanded that she leave their country immediately.”For weeks, I went everywhere by taxi,” said Hohleiter, 30, whose perceived transgressions were contained in a 2008 book, “Sleepless in Seoul,” her memoir about a foreign woman hopelessly in love with a young Korean man. “I just didn’t want to be confronted with this growing public anger.”Hohleiter is among the latest victims of South Korea’s combative and often destructive Internet phenomenon — personal cyber attacks.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-korea-cyberthugs2-2010jan02,0,5421279.story