Thinking about how the brand name Starbucks has changed in meaning over a span of 20 years, one keenly feels how times have changed. In the early 2000s, before coffee shops were yet mainstream, the green Starbucks cup was the emblem of the so-called ‘doenjang girl’. I still vividly remember the atmosphere that society had to punish those supposedly extravagant ‘doenjang girls’, who would pass up a 200-won vending machine coffee and go all the way to a coffee shop to drink an expensive coffee costing more than a meal. It was a collective expression of gender anxiety about young women who, amid the rapid advance of women becoming economically independent and consumers in their own right, were escaping male control both economically and socioculturally.

And in 2026, twenty years later, Starbucks called the anniversary of the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement ‘Tank Day’ and released tumbler promotions attached to the meme ‘tak on the desk,’ only to face a fierce backlash. It even looks somewhat bizarre that parts of the far right posted AI-composited photos covering Starbucks stores with the Taegeukgi while saying ‘let us drink to support’. I think the two episodes, which seem completely opposite, are in fact in the same context. Their common thread is a ‘play culture’ that mocks particular groups. Twenty years ago, young women who consumed Starbucks were lumped together and mocked as doenjang girls, and now to that have simply been added Gwangju and May 18, the Sewol and Roh Moo-hyun, and so on.

Would shutting down Ilbe, as the president suggests, solve this problem? The online community called ‘Ilgan Best Archive’ caused various online attacks and incidents such as the Sewol ferry binge-eating protest only up until, at the latest, the mid-2010s. Ilbe today has become a site where almost no new posts go up. The play culture of mocking specific groups has spread pervasively on Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and X, as well as most large online communities. Even the Starbucks owner, Shinsegae chairman Jeong Yong-jin, has a record of repeatedly posting on Instagram the phrase ‘Sorry, thank you’, a meme mocking the Sewol, alongside photos of seafood. On the Kyunghyang Shinmun women narrative archive account ‘Flat’, hateful meme comments that disparage sexual minorities or other races also appear from time to time (we diligently delete and block whenever we see them).

Then would it be solved by harshly punishing people who use such words? Spreading falsehoods about the May 18 Democratization Movement can be punished under the 5·18 Special Act. Creating and distributing a fake newspaper article claiming that citizens during May 18 acted under North Korean orders is an example. There are claims that the special act should be revised to punish even acts of insult and defamation, but it is difficult to catch all hate expressions that have been meme-ified and coded. The problem also remains of having to set detailed standards, such as which groups should be protected from hate and which expressions should be punishable.

More fundamentally, there is still no social consensus on what counts as hate. In general, hate is defined as directed at groups that have been historically and structurally discriminated against and have been objects of social prejudice. If one skips defining the concept of hate and vaguely says only that hate is the problem, it leads only to a naive and wrong conclusion of the sort ‘the problem is that people hate each other, so if everyone loves each other it will be solved’.

The argument that enacting an anti-discrimination law should come first in order to block hate in the public sphere starts here. The core of such a law is to regulate when these hate sentiments actually turn into acts of discrimination in public domains such as education, employment, and service provision. An anti-discrimination law cannot directly regulate hate speech, but by regulating discrimination it can at least serve to send a message that hate will not be tolerated in the public sphere.

[Flat] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “Korea urgently needs an anti-discrimination law”

While intolerable hate expressions drift around the internet, people who are hurt continue to appear. They may be citizens of Gwangju, bereaved families of the Sewol, women, people with disabilities, or sexual minorities. Ahead of the local elections, banners by Seoul superintendent of education candidate Cho Jun-hyuk reading ‘Expel queer homosexual education’ were hung across the city. For queer teenagers, it is violence. A local book club reportedly hung a banner beneath it that read ‘What education needs is the expulsion of discrimination and hate’. Recently, a group we worked with contacted us to ask, “We had planned to offer Starbucks gift cards as a token of thanks, but would it be okay to switch to gift cards from another cafe?” Showing in each of our places a firm refusal of hate may, perhaps, be one way to reduce the number of people who are hurt.