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Nexon misjudged the controversy over hand gesture due to biased information, insiders say

입력 2023.12.15 17:53

Lee Hong-geun, Kim Eun-seong, Yoon Ki-eun

Nexon misjudged the controversy over hand gesture due to biased information, insiders say

Insiders of Nexon said that the company’s biased method of analyzing public opinion trends may have contributed to its belief in a “conspiracy theory about a controversial hand gesture associated with misandry.” They explained that Nexon's analysis program is designed to rely heavily on the opinions of male-centered online communities. In addition to collecting opinions from the communities, the online game company was apparently involved in the formation of public opinion by paying NX (Nexon’s online cash) to certain postings.

According to a report by Kyunghyang Shinmun on December 14, Nexon has been analyzing the trends in the communities in real time using the public opinion analysis program "User Voice" for several years. User Voice is a program that crawls postings on various communities every seven minutes on average and checks whether they positively or negatively evaluate Nexon games. If the negative trend intensifies, the program sends a “negative trend surge notification” email to the relevant staff in the company.

Some also said that the monitoring of User Voice is heavily focused on male-oriented communities such as Dcinside.

They also added that Nexon is not only observing the trend of public opinion, but is also involved in forming public opinion. The company has been operating the Nexon Content Reward Program (CRP) since February. The program rewards NX for postings in communities that are evaluated as an excellent one.

Nexon explained, "It is true that we referred to User Voice in relation to the controversy over hand gesture," but added, "User Voice crawls various websites based on game-related keywords, and does not sample only certain communities. And the trend of that time was not biased because the program checked more than 20,000 postings on various websites.”