X versus Threads: Is Korea’s political divide deepening online?

As Korea's political divide deepens, the country's online public sphere may also be splitting in two, with the ruling bloc appearing to center on X and the main opposition seeming to focus on building its presence on Threads. This division has fueled concerns that separate digital ecosystems could reinforce ideological echo chambers.

The ruling Democratic Party (DP) has been heavily using X and Facebook to mobilize supporters and spread its messages.

“Information spreads much faster among supporters on X,” DP Rep. Kim Nam-hee said. “Facebook is mainly for communicating with local residents, while X is focused on engaging supporters.”

DP Rep. Kim Nam-joon said he had recently stopped using Threads because “the proportion of conservative users is much higher there.”

The opposition People Power Party (PPP), by contrast, seems to have made Threads its main platform.

“X and Facebook are dominated by highly engaged political users, including politicians and journalists, so public opinion there can be distorted,” Kim Min-soo, a member of PPP's Supreme Council, said. “Threads is the platform where public opinion can be detected the fastest. I actively encourage people around me to use multiple social media platforms.”

The politicization of online platforms dates back to the Lee Myung-bak administration from 2008 to 2013.

At the time, progressive activists believed the government was attempting to suppress criticism during the candlelight protests over U.S. beef imports that were threatening the local beef industry. Twitter, now known as X, was at that time perceived to be less vulnerable to censorship and allowing information to spread quickly, so it subsequently emerged as the dominant platform for online political communication.

Since then, social media has driven popularity and prominence for Korean politicians. 

Former minor Rebuilding Korea Party leader Cho Kuk, liberal commentator and former health minister Rhyu Si-min and liberal critic and professor Chin Jung-kwon all became leading voices on the platform. Former President Moon Jae-in, President Lee Jae Myung and most DP lawmakers, who now have some of the largest followings among ruling party politicians, all joined Twitter between 2009 and 2011.

“Once a social media platform develops a particular political identity early on, it tends to retain that character,” political consultant Kong Hee-joon said. “Prominent progressive figures such as Gong Ji-young, Cho Kuk and Lee Oi-so during the Lee Myung-bak administration dominated Twitter discourse.

“That momentum carried into the then-opposition's victory in the 2011 Seoul mayoral by-election, the popularity of the podcast 'Naneun Ggomsuda' [I'm a Petty-Minded Creep] and the 'Ahn Cheol-soo phenomenon.' After the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in 2017, Twitter became firmly established as a progressive-leaning platform.”

Having seemingly ceded what has become X to the ruling bloc, the PPP appears to have moved to establish an early presence on Threads, which had largely been unoccupied politically.

Launched by Meta in 2023, Threads quickly attracted users in their 20s and 30s, particularly those with a strong interest in politics, because of its integration with Instagram. Its algorithm, which prioritizes viral content over follower counts, also proved favorable for the spread of political content.

“Young conservatives in their 20s and 30s who grew tired of the progressive dominance on X may have gathered on Threads, where they feel their voices are more effective, creating a public sphere led by the opposition,” Lee Sang-won, a media studies professor at Korea University, said.

The PPP’s Kim Min-soo began using Threads after the party’s national convention in August last year and has since amassed 110,000 followers, the largest following among Korean politicians on the platform.

“There is no platform that reflects young people's unfiltered opinions as directly as Threads, including over issues such as the Olympic Park protests,” Kim Min-soo said. The Olympic Park protests refer to demonstrations held at Olympic Park in Songpa District, southern Seoul, over ballot shortages during the June 3 local elections.

An official in PPP Rep. Joo Jin-woo's office said the lawmaker had received tips related to the National Election Commission through Threads and later used those ideas to raise questions about opaque no-bid contracts for election materials.

While the PPP seems to be actively using Threads, some in the DP have shared mixed feelings toward the platform.

“It is difficult to dismiss it as simply a conservative platform because so many young people use it,” an official in the office of a senior party lawmaker said

“We need to use it to reach more young people, but the problem is that it isn't very effective.”

Political division across social media platforms is not unique to Korea.

After Elon Musk acquired X in 2022, a number of progressives in the United States migrated to Bluesky and Threads. In contrast, many conservatives seemed to gravitate toward Truth Social, the platform created by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Among users across seven platforms, including Truth Social and Telegram, 65 percent said they had found a community of people who share their views, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.

Researchers said the growing separation of platforms was reinforcing confirmation bias by creating echo chambers.

Cho Hang-je, a professor of media communication at Pusan National University who studies online communities, warned that the trend becomes even more dangerous when platform segregation is combined with algorithmic bias.

“When platforms are divided along political lines and algorithmic bias is added, the risks become much greater,” Prof. Cho said. “Once users are drawn into the vortex of their own political camp, closed-mindedness, hostility and extremism become even stronger. Society needs ways to expand common ground through legacy media or shared platforms.”

BY YEO SUNG-KUK, RYU HYORIM [[email protected]]