Abstract
Internet policy in South Korea has attracted criticism for its seeming incompatibility with consolidated democracy. We present a pair of qualitative case studies examining Internet censorship in the context of recent major protest movements in South Korea: the 2015 textbook protests and the 2017 impeachment demonstrations. Further, over a six-year period, we collected 30 million South Korean tweets, and daily data from South Korea's primary blogging platform (Naver Blogs) on political speech. By comparing discussion of politics, North Korea, and censorship on the two platforms (one theoretically censorable by the South Korean government, the other not) we conclude that censorship is not a major factor in South Korean Internet speech.