'Kim Moon-soo Will Beat Lee Jae-myung'... Poll That Shook a 500-Member Group Chat [True Story]

[Financial News] "Kim Moon-soo 43%, Lee Jae-myung 39%. We have achieved a golden cross."
On the morning of June 3 last year, election day for the 21st presidential election, a post predicting the victory of then-People Power Party candidate Kim Moon-soo appeared in a KakaoTalk group chat with about 500 members.
The post was written by A, a 72-year-old male supporter of Kim. It said Kim was leading the rival candidate by 4 percentage points and was likely to win by more than 1.65 million votes. It also urged people to go vote, saying the race had turned around in just a few days. But there was no way to tell where those numbers came from. There was no explanation of which organization conducted the survey, when it was done, or who was questioned.
Publicly released opinion polls at the time showed the opposite. Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) was ahead of Kim, and the order of first and second place was reversed from the post A shared.
When A ended up in court over the matter, he argued that he had only passed along a post he received from an acquaintance. He said he believed it was not an official poll result but a prediction post summarizing the political landscape, and that he did not question its contents because it came from someone he trusted.
He also claimed that, since he did not write it himself, he could not be said to have publicly announced a poll result. The court, however, did not accept that explanation.
The message included the phrase 'based on a June 1 poll' and listed support rates for each candidate in specific terms. The court found that it clearly took the form of a poll result citation, rather than a simple personal analysis. It also noted that A did not check the polling agency or method, even though the ranking of the candidates was completely different from previously released surveys. The court concluded that A posted the message in the group chat despite knowing it could have been fabricated.
What A said during the investigation also influenced the court's decision. He stated, in effect, that "if people think Kim Moon-soo is losing, they may not go to the polls, so I posted it to encourage them to vote because he was ahead."
The court also determined that A was not merely passing along the message, but was in fact spreading it himself. About 502 people were in the group chat, and the post was in a format that anyone could easily copy and redistribute.
According to legal sources on the 5th, Criminal Division 11 of the Seoul Western District Court, presided over by Judge Yoon Ung-gi, sentenced A to a fine of 2.5 million won on May 8 for violating the Public Official Election Act.
After posting the message, A was informed by the Sejong City Election Commission that it could be illegal. He then posted again in the group chat, asking others not to spread it and to delete it because it could cause controversy. But that came about 1 hour and 30 minutes after the first message had been posted. The court said that because the post had already been made public in a group chat with hundreds of members, a late request to stop its spread did not erase his responsibility.
The panel said that on election day, while voting was still underway, A posted unverified poll figures in a highly shareable group chat, creating a risk of misleading voters. At the same time, it took into account that A did not appear to have written the post himself and that he asked for it to be deleted and not shared further after receiving guidance from the election commission.
425_sama@fnnews.com Choi Seung-han Reporter