1. Meaning of ‘Election Campaign’ under the Public Official Election Act
Regarding the ‘election campaign’ under the Public Official Election Act, the Supreme
Court ruled that it shall mean an active and planned activity that is carried out with objective
intention of helping a certain candidate win or lose in a specific election. Accordingly, even
when a teacher, who is banned from engaging in an election campaign under the Act,
expresses his/her political opinion or belief through social networking services such as
Facebook and the content is regarded relevant to the election, such act should not be
concluded as the part of election campaign just for those reasons (Supreme Court, Case No.
2017DO2972, November 29, 2018).
In this regard, to decide whether a person’s simple act of sharing online news articles or
others’ posts on a social networking service account constitutes a ‘election campaign’, the
contents of the posts as well as other circumstances that may suggest actions with explicit
intention of helping a certain election candidate win or lose in a certain election such as the
volumes of posts in the social media account; whether there were posts similar to the ones at
issue; whether the account is created close to the election day and excessive number of people
were add to friends while posts with similar contents are uploaded exceptionally or
continuosly, should be examined comprehensively.
2. Judgment on This Case
The Complainant shared the online article regarding a certain candidate for the upcoming
general election was telling a lie on a personal account, but did not mention any additional
comments toward it. By considering the contents of the post shared by the Complainant, total
number of Facebook friends (4,583), and a mere fact that the Complainant uploaded one more
posting about the aforementioned candidate on the same day on a personal Facebook account,
it is hard to conclude that such act is amount to the ‘election campaign’, which is an active
and planned action with the objective intention of helping a certain candidate to win or lose in
a certain election.
Therefore, the suspension of prosecution granted to the Complainant on the premise that
the Complainant’s action is part of the ‘election campaign’ was resulted from arbitrary
judgment on evidence, insufficient investigation and misunderstanding on the law.