TIL that internet censorship is pervasive in South Korea including blocking of sites critical of the government, pornography, sites related to North Korea, and copyrighted material

I'm currently in South Korea and on domestic internet.

Reddit is not restricted at all, as far as I can see - and I can get access to the posts on north Korea, etc with no problem. Obviously I browse in English though, so the restrictions may be more evident there.

If you try to get on a porn site without a VPN though, you are given this: , so yes, there is definitely restriction there.

I browse reddit all the time on public wifi, so I'm pretty sure it's not just because I am a foreigner. If there is anything specific you'd like me to try out then I'd be happy to tomorrow.

Pirate bay and torrents work fine, btw, and are blisteringly fast. From what I read and hear the government here is more concerned with Korean going after copyright issues, and even then there have only been a few cases of large volume torrenters getting nabbed.

Sometime between late 2012 and early 2013 there was a huge government crackdown on internet porn. This was pushed by religious zealots that "volunteered" to hand-select sites to be blocked by the government. Some of the sites they chose were not porn sites but educational/informational ones that had "objectionable material" on them (according to the zealots, that is), such as encyclopedias, blogs, and news sites. Thus, the zealotry not only censored porn, but various other things that people who aren't even part of the government (and thus lacked oversight) thought should be censored.

It just says "you've been blocked for illegal/harmful information" with a list of categories of what is blocked and who to contact in regards to the blocking.

Fucking nanny state. They're making children of their own citizens. I thought SK would have a little more pride than NK. Oh, well.

I visited SK for a few weeks in 2010 and watched A LOT of porn (I had been deployed to Iraq with shitty internet and a few portable HDDs with the same porn over and over). Has something changed since then?

Lived here for five years, married to a korean.....calling bullshit.

It's certainly not as brutal, but it is still terrifyingly authoritarian. Sure, you have the internet and supposed freedom of speech, but with any dissent absolutely crushed. Fascism with a smiley face, supported by the US, no less.

South Korea has an insane amount of hardcore evangelical christians who even burn buddhist temples.

Quick fact: Most South Korean immigrants to the US are korean christians who move to the US, because to them they think "US is christian country"

I'm asian american and its usually you can find a crapton of hardcore and i mean HARDCORE christians out of all other asians within the Korean-american community.

Not really. That was true in the 80's and well into the 90's, but at this point they've strung together some good elections and the military is far less involved in public life than it used to be.

Were you on or off base? Pretty sure they have different rules. I couldn't get on reddit off base without registering with big brother. Still got the police state symbol trying to get to some sites from the barracks wifi from time to time.

Oh, but it works. It works really well.

As for South Korea: The porn blocks aren't done by the government, only supported through it providing a legal basis. Porn per se isn't illegal, it is a citizen-organized censorship with sites only being blocked if enough people among the population report it. However, due to the huge amount of Christians and other religious nutjobs in South Korea, there are people dedicated to spending all their freetime finding and reporting these sites.

Is anyone able to translate the image, to get an idea of what is roughly says?

So South Korea is essentially North Korea with more light?