The clip was also shared in posts on multiple South Korean forums including here and here, as well as on YouTube.
“This shows the Democratic Party depends on votes from the Chinese to win this general election,” one user commented.
“This is proof of the Chinese Communist Party meddling in the general election,” another said.
Foreign nationals do not have voting rights in South Korea’s parliamentary or presidential elections, according to the country’s National Election Commission (NEC).
Those who have been residents for more than three years are legally allowed to vote in local elections (archived link).
Local council
AFP was not able to find the source of Hwang’s speech but an analysis of the video in the posts found it showed her campaigning for a local seat, not the upcoming national elections.
From the video’s one-second mark, the subtitles say: “Tomorrow is South Korea’s nationwide local election early voting day.” Korean captions overlaid in the video also state Hwang is a “proportional representative candidate for city council”.
A keyword search for her name found Hwang is a member of the city council in Ansan city — and was elected in a local poll on June 1, 2022 when she ran on a Democratic Party ticket as a local council proportional representative (archived links here and here).
News media here and here reported she was the first naturalised South Korean citizen to be elected to a local government seat in Ansan, which has a high foreigner and foreign-born population (archived links here and here).
A frame shown in the video corresponds to an image on Naver Maps from May 2022 of a bank in Ansan’s Wongok-dong, a neighbourhood with a large Chinese population (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video circulating online (left) and the image from Naver Maps (right) with the corresponding features highlighted:
A more recent image of the location from February 2023 showed Korean-language signages earlier attached on the bank’s entrance and window appeared to be removed (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of images taken from Naver Maps from May 2022 (left) and February 2023 (right):
Official records from election agency NEC and the Democratic Party’s own list of candidates for 2024 both did not include Hwang (archived link here and here).
Responding to the misleading posts, Hwang told AFP on April 8: “The captions in the clip clearly say that I was a candidate for city council, so people should not mistake this as a recent clip.”
Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung has been a frequent target of misinformation ahead of the elections — including those that accused him of being subservient to China — which AFP debunked here and here.
David Turner is a globe-trotting journalist who brings a global perspective to our readers. With a commitment to shedding light on international events, he explores complex geopolitical issues, offering a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
