Victoria Park

As of May 2024, it has officially been two years since the inauguration of the current South Korean president Yoon Suk-Yeol. As Yoon nears the halfway point of his five-year term, the country’s attention is gathered on his updated approval rating. Upon surveying 1000 citizens across the country, a historic low of 24% responded in approval of Yoon’s presidency. Particularly, Yoon’s second year approval rating draws a stark contrast to that of the ex-president Moon, who held an approval rating of 47% during the second year of his term. Upon closer examination of the reasons behind Yoon’s low approval rating, it is apparent that 19% of those dissatisfied cited “the economy, people’s livelihood and inflation,” whilst 15% took issue with his “insufficient communication with the public.”

On October 24th, 2023, a collective force of 33 states filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The suit, filed in California district court, alleged that Meta had used advertising tailored towards children, which made them addicted to its services, while its failure to properly regulate its platforms created a dangerous and harmful environment for them. The lawsuit against Meta Platforms is of utmost importance to the SPRING Group. As an organization exclusively composed of students who are young adults, the members of the Group are in the age cohort that Meta has directly tailored its deceptive advertising towards. On top of our knowledge regarding the addictive effects of social media, such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, on younger children, SPRING fellows also have personal experiences with living childhoods defined by the constant usage of social networks. As part of its goal of highlighting youth viewpoints on issues of concern to them, SPRING seeks to bring the unique perspective of high school students into the states’ action against Meta. This brief analyzes the specific causes of action in the lawsuit, specifically Meta’s youth-tailored advertising, their negligence and misrepresentation to the public, as well as their harms on the physical and mental safety of younger users. It then delves into the validity of the lawsuit, how it is likely to be ruled upon, and what courts have done or will likely do with it.

Walking into a university hospital in South Korea today, one is faced with the brutal reality of the country’s current medical industry: patients waiting in vain for their treatments, being thrown into the pits of devastation with canceled surgeries, and being neglected for threateningly-long hours when seeking emergency care. Almost 12,000 doctors, particularly trainees, have walked out from their offices since February 20, 2024 in protest of President Yoon’s recent policy rollout of adding 2000 medical school places starting in 2025. Yoon’s reformation was proposed in an attempt to address the shortage of doctors in rural areas in the face of increasing demand for medical services by South Korea’s rapidly aging population, but it is instead exacerbating the shortage as it lacks consideration of the profit-oriented culture of the industry that serves as the root of the problem.

As of 2024, over 150 South Korean elementary schools find themselves with zero new students, and as Korean reporters put it, “accelerating the path to national population extinction.”1 South Korea’s fertility rate has been decreasing steadily since 2015, going from 1.24 children per woman to a world...