confined to a single bulletin board in an online community, netizens investigation teams exercise their influence within and across online communities. They also played a role in calling out Choi Soon-sil’s corruption. The value of such investigative experience is recognized for achieving future goals and developing self-efficacy. 3 Since self-efficacy is a crucial ingredient in many user behaviors with ICT, it helps encourage netizens to persevere toward their goal of spreading the word. In another article, by Her, 10 their part in helping expose the scandal was described like this: “In October [2016], they [neti-zens investigation teams] uncovered a post by Choi Soon-sil’s daughter, Jung Yoo-La, on her personal web-page, saying, ‘If you do not have the ability, you blame your parents. Money is also an ability.’”

Public interest. Interest is a crucial factor in citizen-led e-participation. The example of Korean citizens communicating directly with members of the National Assembly concerning perjury by the President’s chief of staff was also related to a political corruption scandal involving President Park Geun-hye and other important political and business figures. It attracted significant public interest, not only because of related headlines in the country’s major newspapers but also because it had become a topic of everyday conversation in online communities and private group-chats via SMS, as well as in face-to-face everyday neighbor-to-neighbor conversation. It was almost necessary to be aware of the case just to be able to engage in conversation with one’s neighbors. The implication was and still is that social interaction, a strong theme behind millennial engagement, helped keep the public’s attention focused on the issue. The public’s desire for justice and displays of patriotism was significant. The public’s antipathy toward the president’s behavior thus accumulated until she was finally impeached, with citizens asking, “Is this a nation?” and wanting action on behalf of the country.

Kim Gwi-Ok, a professor of sociology
at Hansung University, explained it
like this: “Citizens who are tired of
politics and prosecutors have begun
more revealing, as it displayed wheth-
er a message had been delivered to
and read by its intended recipient(s).
Moreover, citizens could provide in-
formation to politicians and receive
feedback in real time. Being able to
reach members of the National As-
sembly in real time, personally and
directly, citizens could overcome the
shortcomings of traditional indirect
democracy. Various citizens said, “It
is a direct complaint,” “It is crazy that
online representative democracy is
just realized,” and “This is a revolu-
tion of direct democracy.” One mem-
ber of the Assembly, Park Young-sun,
communicated with citizens, not just
with her political aides, thus making
the communication direct.

Collective intelligence. Although an individual citizen’s participation may seem solitary, the wisdom of collective intelligence was now being exercised behind the scenes. On the informant’s first post revealing evidence of Kim’s alleged perjury, he asked for ways to alert the members of the Assembly about it, resulting in 98 comments of support and collaboration. In the comments, citizens shared not only the personal cellphone numbers of Assembly members but also effective ways to ensure the evidence would be included in subsequent hearings. To attract even more citizen participation, they joined him by “ liking” the post, helping push it to the top of the board and leaving the comment: “Make this post to the top.” Having observed the whole process behind an historic alert by a citizen, another citizen said, “Collective intelligence made it happen.” Online communities enable this mechanism and process of collective intelligence. Yu27 wrote, “It is a combination of IT information network and collective intelligence of [the online community’s] netizens.”

Prior experience in similar practice. Some citizens were already aware of the powerful effect collective intelligence can have. Looking to get down to the as-yet-unspoken truth of a hot political issue, they are sometimes described collectively as “netizens investigation teams.” Unlike our focused context, where a single netizen plays a key role in a real political moment and where the discussion is

Public disclosure
of Kim Ki-choon’s
alleged perjury
was led not by
the government
but by ordinary
citizens through
social media.