Decade-old photo misrepresented as South Korean reaction to Trump's tariffs

Published on August 11, 2025 at 04:35
3 min read
By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea

An old photo of a crowd celebrating former South Korean leader Park Geun-hye's impeachment has resurfaced in social media posts falsely claiming it shows the public's reaction to Donald Trump saying the United States will impose a 15 percent tariff on the country's goods. The photo -- juxtaposed next to an image of a 2007 protest against a proposed free trade agreement between Seoul and Washington -- was taken nearly a decade before Trump's tariff announcement.

The photo of a joyous crowd, superimposed with Korean-language text that reads "Response to 15 percent tariffs", was shared on Facebook on August 7, 2025.

The photo is contrasted with an image of a protest, which is labelled "Response to 0 percent tariffs".

The comparison circulated after Trump's July 30 announcement of a 15 percent tariff on South Korean imports -- below a 25 percent tariff that the US president had threatened earlier -- after extensive trade negotiations with Seoul (archived link).

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung of the centre-left Democratic Party called the agreement the "first major trade challenge" since his administration came into power in June after the impeachment of Yook Suk Yeol from the conservative People Power Party (archived link).

Opinion polling shows that a significant proportion of South Koreans believed Lee had fared well in negotiations, crediting him with avoiding a collapse in trade talks and preventing even harsher measures (archived link).

Screenshot of the false Facebook post captured on August 8, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

The image comparison was also shared in similar posts elsewhere on Facebook and Threads, as well as on right-wing forum Ilbe.

"That's why we say leftists are brain-dead," read a comment on one of the posts.

Another said: "What are those people thinking?"

But the image comparison misleadingly uses a photo unrelated to any trade agreement between Washington and Seoul.

Impeachment rally

A reverse image search on Google found the photo of the celebrating crowd in a report published by The Korea Economic Daily on December 10, 2016 -- nearly a decade before Trump's tariff demands (archived link).

According to its caption, the photo shows citizens cheering the impeachment of then-president Park Geun-hye, who was embroiled in a corruption scandal (archived link)

The photo was taken shortly after lawmakers passed the impeachment bill, following months of peaceful mass protests calling for Park’s removal.

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared image (left) and The Korea Economic Daily's photo published in December 2016 (right)

A reverse image search of the protest photo used in the false posts led to an article published in left-wing online newspaper Newscham on January 16, 2007 (archived link).

Its caption says it shows protesters in Seoul rallying against the US-Korea free trade agreement (FTA), which was signed later that year (archived link).

Opponents of the FTA feared it would flood the Korean market with cheap US agricultural products, threatening the livelihoods of domestic farmers (archived link).

Lee and his administration are frequent targets of disinformation online, which AFP has debunked multiple times.

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