Digital platforms have played pivotal roles in disseminating disinformation—false information deliberately and often covertly spread to influence public opinion or obscure the truth—and fake news worldwide in the early 21st century, although the primary digital platforms and how people use them differ considerably from one region to another. Unlike regions in the Global South, several Asian countries have developed their own major platforms. In Asia, certain Internet user-generated content platforms like YouTube, and social media networks are known for their “super apps” or “mega-platforms” which manage to integrate a variety of digital services, such as search engines, news, digital games, weather reports and messaging apps, and thus form a platform of platforms. Their business models and interfaces reflect Asian subcultures (Steinberg, 2020), although Asian platform customers use global digital platforms as well.
This article describes the diversity of platform constellations in East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and discusses significant differences between them. It explains what super apps are and how they have evolved in East Asia with regional and local particularities. It goes on to discuss the dual role of super apps in at once disseminating and combatting disinformation, and the gravity of the problem of fake news and disinformation on the platforms. The article concludes with a look at efforts to curb this global scourge.
Super Apps in East Asia
Digital platforms have surged in East Asian countries since the turn of the millennium. Unlike Western countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Canada, in which a handful of American digital platforms, especially Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp) and Google (YouTube), generally dominate national markets, some East Asian countries have witnessed the growth of local and regional digital platforms alongside existing American platforms.
South Korea has become a primary actor in creating and advancing local platforms. Although a latecomer to the Internet revolution, the country has developed several mega-platforms, also known as “super apps,” including in particular Naver and Kakao, since the early 2000s. Many Koreans use these super apps for mobile games, GPS, news, and weather updates, among other functions. While global platform leaders like Google and Yahoo have focused on their search engines (Jin, 2023), Naver and Kakao have created LINE and Kakao Talk, instant mobile messengers that have eventually become super apps.
Kakao Talk has become the most prominent digital platform in the mobile messenger and social media sectors in South Korea. Since its release in March 2010, Kakao Talk has been a significant driver of the widespread shift from computers to smartphones, in daily life in business, for functionality and mobility. After quickly overtaking global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X), Kakao Talk parlayed its platform to become South Korea’s foremost social networking service (Choi, 2013). While Naver focuses on web portals, Kakao gained the upper hand in the instant messaging market with Kakao Talk, whose users numbered 47.9 million in January 2023, corresponding to 94% of domestic smartphone users. Naver Band's group chat service users numbered 19.5 million as of October 2023.
In Japan, Naver’s LINE serves as a super app combining many different services. Not only is it the most popular messaging app in Japan, used by 85% of the population, but it also provides over fifty other services, including mobile payment, trading, banking, insurance, news, games, job searches, Manga, and music. Since overtaking Facebook in 2018, LINE has become the biggest digital platform in Taiwan, too, despite competition from several local social media platforms, including Dcard.
Japan and Taiwan use LINE in different ways. While in Japan LINE functions as a super app, it is mainly used as a messaging app in Taiwan, where it competes neck-to-neck with US-based social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (OOSGA, 2023).
Super platforms also spread fake news
East Asian countries have diverse views on the use of digital platforms, in particular concerning their increasing influence on public opinion. Instead of providing information and news for the public’s benefit, some of these platforms spread mis- and disinformation. While traditional media outlets such as radio, television and newspapers used to be the dominant public sphere media, a seismic shift has occurred since the emergence of digital media in the mid-1990s (Kim and Jin, 2024).
East Asian countries have different media environments. In South Korea, Naver and Kakao have strengthened their position as primary digital platforms in the public sphere. According to a 2023 Korea Press Foundation report, 76.2% of the population still got their news from TV in 2023, followed closely by online news (73.5%), newspapers (10.2%), and radio (7%). Among the Internet portals, Naver has become the dominant player, and many Koreans read the news on Naver’s so-called “Newsstand.” But Naver has been criticized by media scholars and other experts for acting as a mediator that controls and even manipulates the news.
Digital platforms have negatively influenced the public sphere in East Asia by widely disseminating mis- and disinformation. South Korean politics and culture have been undermined by fake news created or spread by digital platforms for financial benefits (Kim and Jin, 2024). Cases in point include the spread of fake news and disinformation during national elections (both presidential and general) and disinformation about celebrities, including K-pop stars and famous actors, and about several big publicly traded companies. Some YouTubers have sought to subvert national elections and other political processes by spreading disinformation on social media, including fake news about the leading presidential candidates (Sheehy et al., 2024).
About 77% of South Koreans have seen or heard about fake news or false information disguised as straight news stories on social media. According to a 2021 report by the Korea Press Foundation, US digital platforms like YouTube (58.4%) and Facebook (10.6%) were widely blamed for the spread of fake news, even though most Koreans get their news from domestic platforms like Naver and Kakao. The distortion of the public sphere driven by social media platforms is not very different in other East Asian countries. “Taiwan is flooded with assorted types of disinformation,” writes Huizhong Wu in CityNews Toronto. “It touches every aspect of a person’s life, from conspiracy theories on vaccines to health claims aimed at promoting supplements to rumors about major Taiwanese companies leaving the island” (Wu, 2024).
Regulating the spread of mis- and disinformation
Prompted by public outcry, independent fact-checking organizations have emerged around the world, and many platforms, both global and national, have developed efforts to combat fake news and disinformation. And in the wake of a recent surge of mis- and disinformation on various digital platforms in Asia, several Asian governments have passed legislation to curb the spread of fake news, while various private sector organizations, including broadcasting and digital platform companies, have taken steps to the same end. To minimize abuse and misuse of advanced technologies, including digital platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms, some governments in Asia, including South Korea, have also established ethics charters setting forth clear-cut rules of conduct for developers and users alike. But these rules, regulations and charters are, in many cases, merely unenforced guidelines and hence ineffective.
In 2023, for instance, the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office formed a special investigation team to take on fake news. The Korean prosecutors accused several media outlets, including social media platforms, of “attempting to distort public opinion by publicly releasing false information” during the national elections, and said they would “swiftly investigate and uncover the full story of a serious case” of disinformation for electoral purposes (Lee, Cho, and Jo, 2023). In May 2022, the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) set up a Fake News Reporting and Counseling Center at the Korea Press Foundation—a government-funded agency—, which some critics condemned as overreach in the government’s efforts to control media narratives. “By classifying so-called fake news as a ‘malicious information epidemic’ and creating its own center for reporting and counseling, the government is effectively setting itself up as the arbiter of truth. [...] This initiative raises significant concerns about the potential for abuse and the further erosion of press freedom” (Jang, 2024).
Some mega-platforms have developed their own regulatory mechanisms. Naver, for example, has doubled down on its control over news distribution, thereby reducing the diversity of accessible news outlets and posing a potential threat to the freedom of the press (Kim and Jin, 2024). Naver has contracted with selected media outlets to post their news on Naver’s Newsstand, though without revealing the number of such contracts. As one of the leading digital platforms, Naver drafts and develops its own codes of ethics. In 2024 it put together an independent News Innovation Forum, run entirely by non-governmental personnel (Lee, 2024; Kim, 2024), to help Naver News Service fulfill its civic responsibilities and increase fairness and transparency. To this end, a separate organization called the News Alliance Evaluation Committee, set up for alliances between Naver, Kakao, and various news outlets in 2015, began by reviewing news algorithms and Naver’s editorial and news commentary policies. Now that AI algorithms also produce and disseminate fake news and disinformation, Kakao has taken steps to prevent algorithms from biasing outcomes and laid out ethical standards to regulate the use of data for machine learning purposes (Kakao, 2018). Their effectiveness, however, has yet to be confirmed by any independent studies.
Recent events in Japan, including the COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the shooting death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022, have raised awareness about the dangers of fake news and disinformation. In response, a Tokyo-based nonprofit organization created the Japan Fact-Check Center, staffed by journalists and academics, in October 2022 (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2023).
Over in Taiwan, the Executive Yuan (the executive branch of government) has created a feature on its website to identify erroneous reporting and combat the spread of fake news. Likewise, Taiwan’s Open Culture Foundation in May 2018 introduced an AI-driven fact-checking chatbot for users called Cofacts to combat fake news (Cha, Gao, and Li, 2020). Other initiatives, such as MyGoPen and the Taiwan Fact Check Center seek to raise public awareness by debunking individual user-reported rumors (Klepper and Wu, 2024).
So East Asian governments have passed rules and regulations and taken various measures to curb fake news and disinformation. But “fact-checking of fake news remains daunting and requires tremendous time and effort in terms of human investigation. Moreover, it is prone to low efficiency and inadequate coverage due to the complexity of the topics being checked and is incapable of keeping up with the fast production and diffusion of falsehoods online” (Cha, Gao, and Li, 2020).
In recent years, social media has gained tremendous importance in society in general and in the spread of fake news and disinformation in particular throughout East Asia. But it is difficult to identify common characteristics across these countries due to their diverse media environments, which have given rise to marked differences in their ways of using social media, in the implications of social media-driven fake news and in measures taken to regulate digital platforms.
