Legal Ground of Suspension of Prosecution Public Official Election Act (amended by Act No. 9974, January 25, 2010) Article 255 Section 1 Item 2; and, Article 60 Section 1 Item 4 Summary of the Decision 1. Meaning of ‘Election Campaign’ under the Public Official Election Act Regarding the ‘election campaign’ under the Public Official Election Act, the Supreme Court ruled that it shall mean an active and planned activity that is carried out with the objective intention of helping a certain candidate win or lose in a specific election. Accordingly, even when a teacher, who is banned from engaging in an election campaign under the Act, expresses his/her political opinion or belief through social networking services such as Facebook and the content is regarded relevant to the election, such act should not be concluded as the part of election campaign just for those reasons (Supreme Court, Case No. 2017DO2972, November 29, 2018). In this regard, to decide whether a person’s simple act of sharing online news articles or others’ posts on a social networking service account constitutes an ‘election campaign’, the contents of the posts as well as other circumstances that may suggest actions with the explicit intention of helping a certain election candidate win or lose in a certain election such as the volumes of posts in the social media account; whether there were posts similar to the ones at issue; whether the account is created close to the election day and an excessive number of people were added to friends while posts with similar contents are uploaded exceptionally or continuously, should be examined comprehensively. - 10 -