MEANWHILE, when everyone is online: The Darker Side of South Korea's Social Media Culture

In my previous post, I wrote about Germany’s surprisingly restrained approach to social media. Although 93% of German adults use the internet, only 51% use social media. South Korea presents an almost opposite picture: 99% of adults use the internet, and 80% use social media. As a Korean, this difference feels very real. In Korea, being online is not just a tool for finding information. It is closely connected to entertainment, relationships, trends, beauty standards, and even personal identity.

Of course, this hyperconnected environment has many benefits. Social media allows people to exchange information quickly, organize communities, discover creative work, and participate in public conversations. However, it also means that unhealthy ideas can spread, evolve, and become normalized just as quickly.

Bruns (2008) describes online users as “produsers” who do not merely consume content but continually create, modify, and circulate it. Unfortunately, this collaborative process does not guarantee that the resulting culture will be healthy. Sometimes, users collectively produce knowledge. At other times, they collectively produce impossible beauty standards—or something much more dangerous.

From “Slim” to “Bone-Skinny”

One social media trend that I genuinely wish would disappear is 뼈말라, which can be translated as “bone-skinny.” This does not simply describe being slim. It celebrates being thin enough that one’s bones are visibly prominent.

As someone who values regular exercise and healthy eating, I find this trend especially disturbing. Health is not about making the number on a scale as small as possible. However, young people are constantly exposed to extremely thin K-pop idols, actors, and influencers. After seeing these bodies repeatedly, an unusually low weight can begin to look not only normal but ideal.

A common Korean formula says that an ideally thin person should have a difference of at least 120 between height in centimeters and weight in kilograms. Under this standard, a woman who is around 5 feet 5 inches tall would be expected to weigh no more than approximately 99 pounds. Even 110 pounds may be discussed as if it were “too heavy,” while a weight somewhere in the low 90s becomes an aspirational goal.

The Korea Health Promotion Institute has warned that social media trends such as “bone arms”—arms thin enough for the outline of the bones to be visible—promote body types far outside a healthy weight range. Yet these images continue to circulate through before-and-after posts, celebrity videos, diet challenges, and casual comments about other people’s bodies.

This is where produsage becomes important. A teenager may first encounter the standard through an idol’s photograph, but the trend does not stop there. Users repost the image, praise the idol’s weight loss, create diet challenges, compare measurements, and share their own progress. Together, they transform one celebrity image into a much larger social standard. The users are not simply victims of the trend; often without realizing it, they also help produce and maintain it.

When Anonymity Becomes a Weapon

The more frightening side of South Korea’s online culture involves aggressive misogyny. Online spaces associated with the manosphere and incel-like resentment often allow some young men to project their anxiety, anger, and sense of failure onto women. Instead of addressing the social and personal pressures they experience, they turn women into convenient targets.

I do not mean that every frustrated young man is an incel or that all male online communities are dangerous. However, research on young Korean men’s anti-feminism has identified narratives of male victimhood, resentment, and hostility toward women circulating through online communities (Jung, 2023). When these attitudes are reinforced by anonymity and group approval, disturbing language can begin to feel ordinary.

Kietzmann et al. (2011) explain that identity, sharing, conversations, relationships, reputation, and groups are central building blocks of social media. They also warn that an unhealthy balance between identity and privacy can reduce accountability and encourage cyberbullying. More than a decade later, South Korea’s deepfake crisis demonstrates how serious that warning was.

In 2024, investigations uncovered numerous Telegram chat rooms in which users created and shared sexually explicit deepfakes of women and girls. Some rooms were organized by school, university, or geographic area. Victims were often not celebrities or strangers. They were classmates, teachers, coworkers, and acquaintances whose ordinary social media photographs had been taken and combined with sexually explicit bodies without their consent. Women and teenage girls made up the overwhelming majority of the victims.

This is an especially horrifying form of produsage. Participants did not simply view abusive material created elsewhere. They supplied photographs of women they knew, requested manipulated images, circulated the results, and helped expand the community. A photograph uploaded for friends could be removed from its original context and turned into raw material for collective sexual humiliation.

Connection Is Not Automatically Community

Social media is often praised for helping people connect, collaborate, and create. Those possibilities are real, and I do not want to dismiss them. But connection alone does not create a healthy community. A group can collaboratively produce a helpful knowledge base, or it can collaboratively produce an eating disorder culture. It can support someone who feels isolated, or it can transform that isolation into organized hatred.

South Korea’s 99% internet-use rate and 80% social-media-use rate may look impressive as evidence of technological development. Still, high participation is not automatically social progress. The more deeply social media becomes embedded in young people’s lives, the more seriously we need to teach digital citizenship, body literacy, consent, privacy, and accountability.

Perhaps Germany’s relative social media restraint has something to teach us. Being connected can be valuable, but being constantly exposed, constantly compared, and constantly available for other people’s use is not the same thing as being socially healthy.

References

Bruns, A. (2008). The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage. Fibreculture Journal, 11.

Jung, H. W. (2023). Young Korean men’s anti-feminism and male-victim ideology. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1230577.

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251.