Seoul, South KoreaCNN —
The leader of South Korea’s main opposition party thought the president’s late night martial law announcement was a deepfake when he first saw it, he told CNN on Thursday as his party now seeks to impeach the country’s leader.
President Yoon Suk Yeol announced the decree – which only lasted a few hours before being struck down by lawmakers who forced their way past soldiers into parliament – in an extraordinary late-night television address late Tuesday night
“That night, after I got off work, I was lying in bed with my wife in our home … when my wife suddenly showed me a YouTube video and said, ‘The president is declaring martial law,’” Lee Jae-myung, leader of the liberal Democratic Party (DP), told CNN.
“I replied, ‘That’s a deepfake. It has to be a deepfake. There’s no way that’s real,’” he said, referring to the term for fake audio and video created with artificial intelligence.
“But when I watched the video, the president was indeed declaring martial law – yet I thought to myself, ‘This is fabricated, it’s fake.’”
The news was especially stunning given South Korea has spent the last four decades shaping itself into a vibrant democracy with frequent protests and protected freedoms – a hard-won victory after a long history of bloody authoritarian rule.
In the last few days, after Yoon backed down and lifted the decree early Wednesday, protesters have demanded the president’s removal while opposition parties including the DP begin impeachment proceedings.
