Committee: UNHRC Country: South Korea Institution: LGS Township

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is one of the major six organs of the
UN and was established to shed light upon areas where communities have been oppressed and
people’s rights violated and give a chance for major countries to recognize such problems and
come up with appropriate frameworks to draft up a resolution uplifting the people in need.
In the 21st century, the era of digitalization, internet has become necessity and has brought
much good into the world from increasing universal literacy rate to providing people with a
platform where they can express their opinion, exercise their freedom of expression and connect
with the outside world especially in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it is a sad reality that
not everyone has the privilege of access to internet, especially in the conflict zones, which has
been deemed as a human right by the United Nations General Assembly. Another major concern
is the vicious control of how people use the internet is under Social Media companies like
Facebook, Google, Tiktok and many more which continue to encroach upon the basic digital
rights which are necessary to ensure security for those who access these services. After the
Cambridge Analytica scandal it was shown how important it was to protect these rights and to
prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.
Another major issue is that of the content that is uploaded, shared and accessed in these
platforms. Censorship is necessary to make sure that disruptive and disturbing content does not
make its way to the users, which includes hate speech, content that infringes the rights of minors,
women, LGBT communities and people of different ethnicities and causing unrest. It is also
necessary to control the spread of misinformation on platforms as shown by the Pizzagate and
the QAnon conspiracy theories. But in some instances censorship is used by countries to silent
the dissident and crack-down on any statement critical to a particular party.
South Korea believes that there should be more transparency on how Tech Giants make use of
people’s data and ensure that consumers are aware of how their data is being used. We think of
anti-trust laws to be imperative to prevent these companies from gaining a monopoly and to
make sure that all businesses have the same playing field. We also believe that the malicious
algorithms used by social media platforms should be put to scrutiny and halt the use of micro-
targeting to carry out individual ad campaigns.
South Korea shows deep concern over all these violations of international and
humanitarian law made by countries and tech companies and hopes that with diplomacy, proper
solutions can be made for these violations.