[Anchor]

Following the controversy over the Baejae High School baseball team's cheering, a survey conducted among teachers and students has revealed the severity of historical distortion and hate speech.

Indiscriminate hate speech has already deeply penetrated classrooms and is being consumed as part of daily life. Reporter Jo Yoon-ha listened to what the students had to say.

[Reporter]

This is an image made to look like a newspaper article, claiming that spies who received orders from North Korea seized an armory during the May 18 Democratization Movement.

Although it is dated May 20, 1980, the Gwangju Ilbo shown in the image did not exist at that time.

It is fake news.

[Middle School Student: It does look like it could be real. Things like this pop up a lot on platforms like TikTok...]

Following the Baejae High School Starbucks cheering controversy, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) surveyed approximately 1,100 teachers nationwide. Nearly 90% responded that they had encountered students using historical distortion, hate speech, or mocking expressions in their classrooms within the past year.

Teachers testified that some students refer to Chun Doo-hwan as "Jeon-tank" (a combination of his surname and tank) and shout "Tank Day fighting!" during class.

Mocking expressions targeting specific regions and political groups are also used without hesitation in classrooms.

[High School Student: There are kids who talk about the Jeolla region as if it were a foreign country or overseas.]

[High School Student: Whenever the color blue appears, they make those kinds of comments, and if anything related to the political situation comes up, they just make those kinds of jokes.]

[Middle School Student: I think about 40 to 60 percent of students use (hate or mocking expressions).]

In a survey of approximately 1,600 elementary, middle, and high school students, more than half responded that they had seen content mocking the deaths or tragedies of politicians or celebrities at least once in the past year.

YouTube was the most common source at 53.1%, followed by Instagram and TikTok.

[High School Student: There aren't many people who say 'let's stop,' and it feels more awkward to be the one saying 'no' in that atmosphere.]

[High School Student: Sometimes it's used like a filler word, or it rhymes, or it's just a phrase that rolls off the tongue easily...]

Although these are expressions followed mindlessly in the classroom, more than half of the students responded that they want to learn at school why these expressions are problematic. The KTU has called for strengthened education that enables students to critically read mocking, hateful, or false information and verify facts and evidence.

(Reported by Kim Hak-mo | Video by Kim Jong-mi | VJ: Shin So-young)