The Asian reporter., August 01, 2022, Page 4, Image 4

ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
August 1, 2022
South Korean capital celebrates first pride parade in 3 years
By Kim Tong-Hyung
The Associated Press
S
EOUL, South Korea — Thousands
of gay rights supporters marched
under heavy police guard in the
South Korean capital in July as they
celebrated the city’s first major Pride
parade in three years after a COVID-19
hiatus.
Police were on alert because church-
backed counterprotesters rallied in nearby
streets, highlighting the tensions sur-
rounding the rights of sexual minorities in
the deeply conservative country. There
appeared to be no significant scuffles or
disruptions.
Revellers wearing or waving rainbow
banners cheered during speeches and
swayed to music from a stage in front of
city hall at the Seoul Queer Parade. They
later formed a queue of umbrellas as they
marched toward a downtown business
district amid drizzling rain, calling for
laws banning discrimination based on
sexual orientation.
Police established perimeters to sepa-
rate them from conservative Christian
protesters, also numbering in the thou-
sands, who marched in nearby streets.
They held up banners and chanted slogans
opposing homosexuality as their leader
shouted prayers into a microphone plead-
ing that god “save the Republic of Korea
from anti-discrimination legislation.”
Some of the protesters denounced
conservative Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon over
the city’s unwillingness to block the “lewd”
Pride parade. Gay rights activists are also
unhappy with Oh, who in an interview
with a Christian newspaper said the city
may prohibit the Pride event from using
the city hall plaza starting next year if this
year’s participants “exhibit indecent
materials or overexpose their bodies.”
“Who knows if Seoul City Hall
employees right now are carrying around
rulers, trying to determine whether our
skirts are too short,” Bae Jin-gyo, a gay
rights activist, said from the stage. “What
the Seoul city government should watch is
not the length of our skirts or what we are
wearing, but the environment of
discrimination that surrounds us.”
Following
a
standard
they’ve
maintained for years, the Pride parade’s
organizers required photojournalists to
take pictures of participants from the
“farthest possible” distance and obtain the
consent of every individual whose faces are
identifiable in photos — a measure to
protect participants from backlash as their
images may circulate on the internet.
“I first realized I was [a] sexual minority
when I was in kindergarten, but I didn’t
come out until 2021,” said Jang Yong-geol,
29, one of the few who was willing to speak
to reporters. “This is my first time parti-
cipating in the festival and I really love it. I
don’t know why people hate (sexual
minorities) when we are all humans.”
Thousands of police officers from nearly
60 units were deployed to watch the
demonstrators from both sides, said Kim
Man-seok, an official at the Seoul
Metropolitan Police Agency. Police didn’t
immediately provide a crowd estimate but
had previously forecasted a turnout of
around 40,000 for the duelling events.
While major South Korean politicians
avoided the Pride parade, the event drew a
number of foreign diplomats, including
newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to
South Korea Philip Goldberg, whose
endorsement of gay rights has raised the
ire of conservatives and Christian groups.
Some protested in front of the U.S.
Embassy in recent weeks, denouncing
Goldberg’s appointment as part of the
Biden
administration’s
“homosexual
cultural imperialism.”
Goldberg tweeted during the Pride
parade that “no one should be discrimi-
nated against because of their identity,”
and that he stands with President Joe
PRIDE PARADE RETURNS. Volunteers sit
next to a huge rainbow flag before a parade held as
a part of the 23rd Seoul Queer Culture Festival, in
Seoul, South Korea, on July 16, 2022. Thousands of
gay rights supporters marched under heavy police
guard in the South Korean capital while celebrating
the city’s first major Pride parade in three years after
a COVID-19 hiatus. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Biden in applauding “all those working to
advance the human rights” of sexual
minorities in South Korea.
British Ambassador Colin Crooks drew
cheers as he delivered a speech in Korean,
saying “discrimination based on sexual
orientation or gender identity has no place
in the 21st century.”
“The experience of Britain shows that
the best way to guarantee rights (for
sexual minorities) is through establishing
a system of legal protection,” he said.
While views on sexual minorities in
South Korea have gradually improved in
recent years, they are still harshly
stigmatized and frequently exposed to
hate speech and crimes. Calls for equality
have so far been stymied by a powerful
Christian lobby that has blocked
politicians from passing laws banning
discrimination. Representation is an issue
as there are no prominent openly gay
politicians or business leaders, although
some celebrities have carved out roles in
show business.
The Seoul Queer Parade wasn’t held in
2020 and 2021 because of stringent social-
distancing measures to fight COVID-19.
The country’s anti-virus campaign has
also exposed problems with homophobia. A
string of infections linked to Seoul night-
spots popular with gay men in 2020
sparked a huge public backlash that critics
say possibly intimidated many sexual
minorities from coming forward for
testing.
Associated Press photojournalist Lee
Jin-man contributed to this report.
Harris vows U.S. will strengthen its Pacific islands relations
SUVA, Fiji (AP) — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris
assured Pacific island leaders of more U.S. engagement
after acknowledging the United States may not have
previously provided the diplomatic attention the region
deserved.
Harris’s virtual address to the Pacific Islands Forum,
meeting in the Fijian capital of Suva, came as China vies
for more influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
She proposed new embassies in Tonga and in Kiribati, a
Micronesian state that split in July from the 18-nation
forum in a major blow to regional harmony.
Harris also proposed requesting that the U.S. Congress
triple funding for fisheries assistance to $60 million a year
and appoint the first U.S. envoy to the forum.
“The United States is a proud Pacific nation and has an
enduring commitment to the Pacific islands which is why
President Joe Biden and I seek to strengthen our
partnership with you,” Harris said.
“We recognize that in recent years the Pacific islands
may not have received the diplomatic attention and
support that you deserve. So today I am here to tell you
directly, we are going to change that,” she added.
The United States and the forum’s wealthiest nations,
Australia and New Zealand, are concerned about a
security pact signed this year between China and the
Solomon Islands.
They fear the pact could lead to a Chinese navy base
being established in the South Pacific less than 1,200
miles from the Australian northeast coast.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held a
bilateral meeting with Solomons Prime Minister
Manasseh Sogavare. Albanese’s government was elected
in May with promises of more action on climate change
and an additional 525 million Australian dollars ($358
million) spent on regional aid. Climate change was the
forum’s greatest security concern.
Australia also has a security pact with Solomon Islands
and Australian police have been maintaining peace in the
capital of Honiara since violence late last year.
The new Australian government has described the
China-Solomons pact as Australia’s worst policy failure in
the Pacific since World War II.
“My message will be that Australia is back, reengaged,
with the Pacific,” Albanese told Australian Broadcasting
Corp. before he left Sydney.
“It’s a new era, a new era of cooperation and one of my
messages will be that (our) support for the Pacific doesn’t
come with strings attached,” Albanese added, in a
reference to conditions placed by China on its aid.
Both the Solomon Islands and Kiribati recently shifted
their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing.
Kiribati’s withdrawal from the forum is being interpreted
as a deepening of China’s influence in the region.
In a third test, Facebook still fails to block hate speech
By Barbara Ortutay
AP Technology Writer
F
acebook is letting violent hate
speech slip through its
controls in Kenya as it has in
other countries, according to a new
report from nonprofit groups Global
Witness and Foxglove.
It is the third such test of
Facebook’s ability to detect hateful
language — either via artificial
intelligence or human moderators —
that the groups have run, and that
the company has failed.
The ads, which the groups sub-
mitted both in English and in
Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape,
and bloodshed. They compared peo-
ple to donkeys and goats. Some also
included profanity and grammatical
errors. The Swahili language ads
easily made it through Facebook’s
detection systems and were approved
for publication.
As for the English ads, some were
rejected at first, but only because
they contained profanities and
mistakes in addition to hate speech.
Once the profanities were removed
and grammar errors fixed, however,
the ads — still calling for killings and
containing obvious hate speech —
went through without a hitch.
“We were surprised to see that our
ads had for the first time been
flagged, but they hadn’t been flagged
for the much more important reasons
that we expected them to be,” said
Nienke Palstra, senior campaigner at
London-based Global Witness.
The ads were never posted to
Facebook. But the fact that they
easily could have been shows that
despite repeated assurances that it
would do better, Facebook parent
Meta still appears to regularly fail to
detect hate speech and calls for
violence on its platform.
Representatives for Meta did not
immediately respond to a message for
comment. Global Witness said it
reached out to Meta after its ads were
accepted for publication and did not
receive a response.
Each time Global Witness has
submitted ads with blatant hate
speech to see if Facebook’s systems
would catch it, the company failed to
do so. In Myanmar, one of the ads
used a slur to refer to people of east
Indian or Muslim origin and call for
their killing. In Ethiopia, the ads
used dehumanizing hate speech to
call for the murder of people
belonging to each of Ethiopia’s three
main ethnic groups — the Amhara,
the Oromo, and the Tigrayans.
Why ads and not regular posts?
That’s because Meta claims to hold
advertisements to an “even stricter”
standard than regular, unpaid posts,
according to its help center page for
paid advertisements.
Meta has consistently refused to
say how many content moderators it
has in countries where English is not
the primary language. This includes
moderators in Kenya, Myanmar, and
other regions where material posted
on the company’s platforms has been
linked to real-world violence.
Kenya is readying for a national
election in August. On July 20, Meta
posted a detailed blog post on how it is
preparing for the country’s election,
including establishing an “operations
center” and removing harmful
content.
“In the six months leading up to
April 30, 2022, we took action on more
than 37,000 pieces of content for
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