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Internet portal Daum has begun cleaning up its online message boards following the Korea Communications Commission's decision that messages containing lists of advertisers in Korea's conservative newspapers, posted to encourage people to harass the advertisers and disrupt business, are illegal. The portal removed 58 such lists from its "Press Consumerism" cyber-cafe. Daum says a web administrator will delete identical posts from now on even without requests for removal.
In a statement on its Agora web forum Daum said, "Starting Monday, the IP addresses of posters in Agora will be partially disclosed, numerous posts from the same person will be prevented and we will work to improve the online communications culture." The partial disclosure of IP addresses -- which will look like "123.456.***.789" -- will not completely resolve concerns about online anonymity but will surely burden message writers to some degree. The policy will also help block systematic mass postings from certain computers. Other portals like Naver and Yahoo have already taken such measures.
To prevent mass postings by individual writers, Daum will analyze posts over the past 24 hours and will first restrict access by those who post repetitive messages with inappropriate or coarse language and next move on to suspending their memberships. Daum says the measures reflect criticism that the Agora forum is dominated by only a handful of netizens. Market researcher MetriX shed light on the problem in a study that revealed just 10 people posted 21,810 messages in Agora over the past two and a half months.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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