[Yeit Suda] Why Did 300,000 Won Sound Plausible?

The illusion linking view counts to harm, and the gap left by the memory that says, "I knew it"
Distrust that legal action alone cannot erase... between "That can't be true" and "It could happen"

A video was uploaded to YouTube a few days ago claiming that 30 tourists on Ulleungdo were locked in a warehouse and forced to buy 300,000 won worth of local specialties, and that police and coast guard officers were dispatched and secured 10 million won in compensation. It sounds horrifying. The problem is, it never happened. Neither the police nor the coast guard received any related reports or recorded any dispatches. If no officers were dispatched, it is hard to see how the story could end with the tourists securing 10 million won in compensation.

View of the island from Seokpo, Ulleungdo. A false video claiming that tourists were coerced into buying 300,000 won worth of local specialties recently spread online, once again drawing attention to Ulleungdo's reputation as a tourist destination and the spread of misinformation. Reporter Cho Yongjun.

And yet this bizarre scene feels strangely familiar. Last February, a video circulated claiming that someone had eaten seafood at a street stall in Yeosu and paid 280,000 won. The circumstances here are different. With no business name, receipt or report from a victim, there was no evidence to support the claim. But it is also impossible to say for certain that it never happened. The video was viewed more than 140,000 times, and the comments were split between those suspecting it was fabricated and those saying people should avoid Yeosu.

At this point, it is tempting to write that "fake news is ruining tourism." But the numbers are not so simple. The number of tourists visiting Ulleungdo had already been falling for several years, from 461,375 in 2022 to 347,086 last year. Nor is there data linking the video to a drop in visitors to Yeosu. View counts prove neither belief nor canceled trips. Exposure, belief and behavior are farther apart than we might think.

So a different question remains: Why did 300,000 won and 280,000 won sound plausible?

A meta-analysis of 182 studies published this year found that people tend to judge information as slightly more truthful the more often they encounter it. The effect is not the same in every situation. Still, familiarity plays a part in how we distinguish truth from falsehood. Yeosu had seen real controversies over unfriendliness and hygiene, while Ulleungdo's county governor had apologized over fatty pork belly and accommodation issues. "Tourist rip-offs" were not an unfamiliar story.

That is how reputation works. Before a trip, you cannot try every restaurant and stay at every lodging in a town. You form an impression of places you have not yet visited based on the experiences of people who have been there, news reports and a handful of reviews. Once formed, a reputation becomes the lens through which new stories are judged. The 300,000-won and 280,000-won price tags gave shape to suspicions that were already there. Rather than displacing the truth, the lies borrowed the space left behind by it.

These days, it has also become easier to turn that space into money. The Yeosu video was a short piece of content with an AI-generated voice, while the Ulleungdo video came from a controversy-chasing channel. All it takes is one sensational number added to suspicions people already have. AI and short-form videos are not so much the cause of falsehoods as they have lowered the cost of turning distrust into a cheap, quickly produced commodity.

The people who create and spread misinformation bear responsibility first. Victimized merchants and residents are not to blame. But deleting one video is different from making sure the next one does not catch on. If price gouging and unfriendliness continue in real life, the memory that prompts people to say "I knew it" before "No way" will not disappear either.

The next video might feature 400,000 won. Will we be the first to say, "That can't be true," or "I can believe it, if it's there"? Perhaps a tourist destination's reputation is the distance between those two sentences.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.