Was Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung a user of an online alt-right forum known as "Ilbe"? No, that's not true: Lee does not identify with alt-right beliefs propagated on the forum, was not a user of the forum, and comments he made in 2017 have been taken out of context to claim he was.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published by @user4688440191613 on TikTok, on January 12, 2024, with a caption translated into English from Korean by Lead Stories staff that read:
Do you know that I was a 'Ilbe' once?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Jan 26 02:24:04 2024 UTC)
'Ilbe' is a South Korean online forum that promotes a predominantly right-wing political stance among its users. 'Ilbe users' are known to take a view that the Kwangju Upsiring (archived here) was a 'riot', while Koreans outside the forum consider the uprising a significant part of South Korea's decades-long struggle against military rule in favor of open democracy.
In this context, Lee said he was an Ilbe once as a metaphor during a 2017 speech at Chonnam National University, located in Kwangju. Starting at 01:30 of the original video (archived here) provided by Lee's official Youtube Channel, Lee said:
I define 'ilbe' as those who ruin their lives by believing false information, and I was one of them.
Lee then reflected on his teenage years, when he said he believed the uprising was a riot because he then accepted the propaganda of the military government. However, the TikTok post uses an edited version of the video that removes the crucial context about what Lee was saying in 2017, in order to support the author's false claim.
This claim has appeared (archived here and here) on TikTok and social media over the years as a form of political misinformation and Lee has addressed it specifically, to defend himself from the accusation that he is 'Ilbe' on his Facebook page, (archived here) during the 2022 presidential election campaign.
