Mysterious US Korea Times ad about the power of women sets Twitter ablaze

A bold but cryptic full-page advertisement about the power of women in the US edition of the Korea Times has set Twitter abuzz as concerns about alarmingly low birth rates have persisted in Korea.

The Korean-language daily -- the largest in the US, headquartered in Los Angeles with bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Hawaii, Toronto and Vancouver -- featured the print ad on June 14. The ad simply shows two sentences that read, “The most powerful force of a woman is not giving birth” in both Korean and English.

The two sentences are attributed to "Sung Sam Bang." The individual's identity remains unknown, with no clear indication if it is a real name or pseudonym.

At the bottom of the page, a disclaimer from the Korea Times in small print confirms that the advertisement was paid for, but refrains from either supporting or dismissing its content.

A tweet featuring a photo of the ad shared three days later on June 17, saw more than 2.5 million views by June 19, along with nearly 25,000 retweets and over 10,000 likes. Twitter's viewer metrics include any logged-in user who encounters the tweet, including the author.

The author of this tweet, whose location indicates New York in the Twitter profile, added a comment in Korean saying, "Wow, this is so cool. I wonder what the story was that led this individual to put this thought into action."

"The disclaimer by the newspaper is so embarrassing, as it clearly expected the ad to spark controversy," the user added.

A reply tweet citing a similar phenomenon in Japan also caught substantial attention, garnering over 110,000 views. The reply tweet, also written in Korean, said that the Japanese government once curbed women's employment only later to attempt to foster better working conditions for women in response to the country's steeply declining birth rate. Now, the tweeter said, Japan is "begging women to have children."

The last user’s Twitter profile is primarily composed of retweets of tweets written in Japanese.

South Korean data analytics firm Igaworks, in an April 2022 report, observed that Twitter is now the third-most popular social media service for those in their teens and 20s in Korea. The platform experienced a 24.6 percent increase in monthly active users from Korea in 2022 compared to the same period in the previous year.

Among Korean teens, Twitter even managed to edge out TikTok slightly by approximately 6 percent in terms of the number of users.