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Enough is enough: Korean celebs declaring war on internet trolls, filing lawsuits

July 24, 2015
Taeyeon, left, and Suzy. (Newsis)

Taeyeon, left, and Suzy. (Newsis)

SEOUL, July 24 (Yonhap) — Conventional wisdom says don’t feed the trolls. It’s what they want.

But more and more South Korean celebrities are realizing there’s a better way — sue them.

It’s what Taeyeon of Girls’ Generation, who was recently called a “whore” online and received death threats for apparently failing to demonstrate an appropriate level of enthusiasm on stage, said she would do earlier this week.

On Monday, she announced on her Instagram account that she is already in the process of filing a lawsuit, with “more expected down the road.”

“For the longest time, my family, friends and fans have been hurt by mean comments online and watching this has broken my heart,” she wrote. “Yes, I am watching.”

A fan who uses the Twitter handle “flying_petals” said more than 2,000 emails have been received at an ad hoc email account the fan had set up for reports of hateful comments.

Taeyeon, however, is hardly the first South Korean celebrity to go to such great lengths to silence her trolls.

Kim Jun-su, a member of the boy band JYJ, has also hinted at pressing charges against haters.

“I used to brush them off, thinking ‘Maybe they’ll come around if I try to do better,’” he wrote on his Twitter page. “But some of them have crossed the line and I realized I should no longer ignore them.”

Kim said he will “seriously” discuss whether to take legal measures with his management agency.

Suzy of girl group MissA hasn’t been any more immune to a torrent of abuse.

Last November, a woman in her 30s tweeted at her, saying she should “die in a car accident” and “get expelled from the entertainment industry.”

The woman was later found to have done so because she was jealous that her husband is an ardent Suzy fan.

Litigation, however, doesn’t guarantee punishment in South Korea, where the law mandating people to use their full names online was scrapped in 2012 after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of these bullying cases take place on non-South Korean websites like Facebook and Twitter. South Korean law enforcement authorities would need to ask these websites to share user information to identify the offenders, the process of which could take weeks, if not months.

There is a dearth of success cases, though, like actress Kim Ka-yeon who successfully tracked down her bullies and sued them. More than 90 offenders were uncovered in the police investigation, most of them in their 20s and 30s.

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