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Barack Obama and Sander Levin thought our trade troubles with South Korea were largely about automobiles.

Silly them.

More than 100,000 people, many of them teenagers in school uniforms, clogged the streets of Seoul in massive candlelight protests against U.S. beef imports last week - and 1.2 million viewers tuned in to a live Webcast of the scene on OhmyTV. It was a different reality unfolding that threatens to roil not only U.S.-Korean trade relations but the world of global diplomacy as we know it.

What's happened in Korea these past few weeks is a growing frenzy fed by a hyperactive Internet rumor mill, crackpot pseudo-science, fears of mad cow disease, alarmist TV reports and a dollop of anti-Americanism.

No matter how flaky the reasoning behind the unrest, the consequences are very real. And disturbing.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, sworn into office just 3 ½ months ago, may not survive his April decision, on the eve of a Camp David meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush, to lift South Korea's five-year ban on U.S. beef imports. Lee's approval ratings have sunk from 52 percent to a pitiful 17 percent in one poll, and his entire cabinet offered to resign last week.

Meanwhile, legitimate subjects of tough bargaining between U.S. and Korean trade negotiators - the lopsided U.S. deficit in automotive trade, Korean farmers' concerns about imports of low-priced citrus products from America - are virtually forgotten. So, too, is the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement signed a year ago but still unratified by either side.

Levin, the Royal Oak, Mich., Democrat who chairs the U.S. House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade, and Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Obama, have each opposed the Korean FTA on grounds that it doesn't do enough to open Korea's market to U.S. automakers. Korea ships about 700 cars here for every four American cars sold in Korea.

I've written before that I think Levin and Obama's objections are misguided. The FTA would eliminate the 8 percent Korean tariff on passenger car imports, as well as the 2.5 percent U.S. duty on cars coming the other way. But we can't force people to buy what they don't want. Whatever one's position on automotive trade with Korea, the disconcerting thing is that it's become almost irrelevant amid the hysteria over beef and Koreans' insecurities about their leaders and their country's place in the world.

How did this happen?

Most Americans, happily flipping burgers and steaks on their grills, can't fathom what all the fuss is about. No one - that's nobody, as in zero people - has ever contracted the human form of mad cow disease from eating American beef. A mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, epidemic among cattle hit Britain in the 1980s.

Mad cow disease was detected in a cow in Washington state in 2003, prompting South Korea, Japan and other countries to impose a ban on U.S. beef. But health authorities have pronounced U.S. beef safe and most countries have lifted their import bans.

When Lee Myung-bak lifted South Korea's beef ban in April he clearly saw it as a low-risk gesture of good will to help improve U.S.-Korean relations.

He miscalculated.

His country's people, with a long history of being overrun and badly treated by other countries, still harbor some distrust of outsiders. South Korea has only 21 years of independent democracy under its belt.

In the context of South Korea's history and social norms, it's natural that its people would be alarmed by an external health threat like mad cow.

Fanning those fears is South Korea's standing as one of the world's most wired nations, with a young generation that has wildly embraced the Internet and the latest cell phone technology.

When a sensational report on a popular Korean TV news show claimed recently that Koreans are more genetically susceptible to the deadly human variant of mad cow disease, the buzz spread like wildfire among young Koreans.

High school students worried that U.S. beef, which is less expensive than Korean beef, would be used in school lunches. Some demonstrators carried placards saying, "Why must I die like a mad cow?"

Mad cow Web sites are generating lots of anxious traffic.

OhmyTV, the Web casting crew of OhmyNews, a pioneering South Korean online newspaper, began filming and airing the candlelight rallies in Seoul, which began after Lee lifted the beef ban. As the size of nightly rallies grew, so did the audience for Webcasts.

The result: a little-used OhmyTV media server logged a record 1.2 million unique visitors in one spurt on June 1, according to OhmyNews. That drove the network cost of the media server to $80,000 a week, more than 27 times normal, said OhmyNews finance director Bang Ki-kwan.

OhmyNews, which provides the service for free, revealed its plight to its readers, 34,000 of whom made donations - via mobile phones, credit cards or bank transfers - totaling $130,000 in a 10-day period.

The implications of this are mind-boggling. South Korean high school and college kids, passionately spouting gibberish yet covered live by citizen media that's funded on the fly by viewer donations, have hijacked U.S.-Korea trade diplomacy and rendered Korea's president nearly impotent.

What next?

Bob Dylan wrote a song in 1965 called "Ballad of a Thin Man," packed with inscrutable verses about a wild, fantastical world of bizarre characters, each verse ending like this:

"Something is happening here

But you don't know what it is

Do you

Mister Jones?"

I think I'm catching his drift now.

• Tom Walsh is a business columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at twalshfreepress.com.