In South Korea, Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington would go to jail for ‘click fraud’

Here in the States, we know it as “social marketing.” But the Los Angeles Times reports today on the crime of ‘click fraud.’ Four South Korean bloggers were indicted in Seoul for inflating the number of pageviews they got on websites where they posted anti-government rants:

There is no financial gain from this kind of hit manipulation. Many say it’s innocuous. Instead, it involves bloggers who inflate the number of visitors to their websites to generate more interest in their comments — and in the case of the four bloggers, those comments were anti-government rants.

In what South Korean authorities say may be the first prosecution of its kind, the four were indicted this week on charges of manipulating Web hits on their writings in an online forum.

Their methods were both high- and low-tech: There were sophisticated viral programs, but one blogger placed a coin on the refresh key so it continued to repeat hits on his posting.

via 4 South Korean bloggers face click fraud charges – Los Angeles Times.

The Times carries on reporting that President Lee Myung-bak is engaged in a fight against free speech online. I hope saying that doesn’t get an Interpol warrant out for me, or anyone who clicks on this story. Sounds like the Korean leader has some Pyongyang envy.

This kicks thoughtcrime up a notch. Think of the millions robbed of their time for clicking on a story they didn’t really want to read in America.

It’s frightening to think that someone would cook up charges like this – the auto-refresh functions on major news aggregators like the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post do this about a million times a day. Are Reddit, Digg, Fark, Buzzfeed, and the websites that all the cool kids click on all the time fraudulent entities that will soon get cease and desist letters from courts in Seoul? The mind spins. But you have to imagine that if they successfully prosecute this over there, someone will pursue it over here, too.