Ahead of its April 10, 2024 parliamentary elections, South Korea took an unusually hard line on AI in campaigns. A revision to the Public Official Election Act banned the use of deepfakes in election campaigning during the 90 days before a vote. As recorded in the OECD’s AI Incidents Monitor, the country’s National Election Commission identified 129 AI-generated deepfake videos and images that violated the election law in the weeks before the vote.
The contrast with other 2024 elections is instructive. Where India and Indonesia largely let parties deploy synthetic media, and the United States relied on a patchwork of platform policies and a narrow robocall ruling, South Korea wrote an outright prohibition into election law and stood up enforcement to match. That made it one of the first countries to treat campaign deepfakes as a per se legal violation rather than a disclosure or platform-moderation problem.
For a business reader, South Korea is a useful data point on the regulatory end of the spectrum: a jurisdiction that chose to ban a class of AI content in a specific context and built monitoring to enforce it, rather than leaving the question to voluntary industry commitments.