Legally, South Korea cannot sanction activists sending balloons across the border due to a 2023 court ruling that bans it as an unjustifiable infringement on free speech.
Activist Park Sang-hak, who defected from North Korea and has been sending anti-regime leaflets north for years, said he floated 20 balloons laden with propaganda as well as flash drives with K-pop and television dramas across the border on Thursday last week.
The North is extremely sensitive about its people accessing South Korean pop culture, with a United Nations report saying possession of large amounts of such content has been known to result in the death penalty.
Tensions over the duelling propaganda have previously boiled over in dramatic fashion.
In 2020, blaming the anti-North leaflets, Pyongyang unilaterally cut off all official military and political communication links with Seoul and blew up a disused inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in years, with Kim Jong Un hosting Russian leader Vladimir Putin and signing a mutual defence agreement that has raised hackles in Seoul.
In response, the South – a major weapons exporter – has said it will “reconsider” a long-standing policy that has prevented it from supplying arms directly to Ukraine.
