Since the early days of his political career, Lee Jae-myung 이재명 has been something of what internet users call a Poaster: an enthusiastic user of online communication networks - first blogs, then later social media, particularly Twitter. Lee’s witty and blunt online presence was one of the factors behind his rise from suburban mayor to president. One early Lee fan club dubbed themselves the Finger Revolutionaries 손가락 혁명군 in honor of their own primarily smartphone-based activism.
Lee’s online persona was never particularly warm and fuzzy, but lately, it may be causing more trouble than usual. On September 18, Lee retweeted an apparent supporter who posted a list of Lee’s achievements as president. Twitter users who looked more closely at the account than Lee had soon found that the user had been posting slurs against Democratic Party 민주당 leaders unaligned with Lee, such as former party chairman Jeong Cheong-rae 정청래. Lee quietly deleted the retweet.
Even Lee’s allies have begun losing patience with his Twitter habits. Prominent liberal pundit Kim Eo-jun 김어준 urged Lee to stop retweeting, warning that Lee could be trapped in an “algorithm prison” - a deliberate engineering of Lee’s Twitter feed to bait him into making mistakes. Lee bristled at Kim’s suggestion - on Twitter, naturally: “The fact that I interact with someone does not mean I agree with everything that person does or says.”