About a week ago, vandals in South Korea began defacing the map. During that week, I rolled back hundreds of changes, and with the help of the site’s moderators, I banned more than 50 malicious accounts.
Actually, this problem had arisen not even a week ago, but about a month ago. Subsequently, South Korean media reported that an account had allegedly leaked the locations of all military bases in the country on OpenStreetMap to the public. (Add)
Still, I found this false media claim disgusting, but it didn’t cause any major problems. Around the same time, another Korean media report about OpenStreetMap appeared: allegedly, an error in domestic mapping services Nevermap and KakaoMap displaying a river in North Korea was linked to OpenStreetMap’s activities: (link)
It is hard to say whether this is a deliberate attack on OpenStreetMap or whether Korean journalists simply lack the basic journalism training to understand the issue. I’m leaning towards the latter, because if there was a deliberate intention, they would have acted more intelligently. But only the result matters. The news soon made its way into ultra-conservative circles of the Korean right, which are obsessed with conspiracy theories, set up their accounts under the hashtag #YoonAgain, and believe that OpenStreetMap is the creation of Chinese communists and Russian Putinists. He says that yesterday Russia bombed Ukraine with OpenStreetMap and tomorrow North Korea will start bombing the South. So they raided OpenStreetMap with the goal of saving (and embarrassing) their country once again.
But to me the funniest thing about this whole situation is that the sabotage was not even done at Korean military bases, but at power plants. Apparently, some employee in one of them (or even in a ministry) was such a crazy person that he managed to convince his superiors that there was data somewhere online that needed immediate deletion. He didn’t send any official requests, didn’t write on the forum, and refused to engage in conversation (I tried). He and at least a few other people constantly create accounts on OpenStreetMap and try to delete things that I can restore with one click.
that’s how it goes 🙂
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