North Korea.
You probably know it for being a horrific, repressive military dictatorship.
But what if I told you that life there is super cool and normal?
Would you believe me?
The North Korean government’s propaganda arm thinks you might, which is why lately,
they’ve gotten into the YouTube game.
These are their top influencers.
But who, exactly, are they?
And why is a country that banned YouTube in 2016 backing YouTubers?
And why aren’t they backing me, when I make videos about the glorious DPRK all the time?
Like all things North Korea, it’s hard to know for certain, but we have a pretty good
idea.
Those two creators were Song A—an eleven year old who shows you all her favorite spots
in Pyongyang, such as the children’s hospital: [SONG A]: “A child who comes here even forgets
why they have come because of the cartoon pictures on the wall.”
And YuMi, whose life in Pyongyang is also fun and relatable:
[YUMI]: “It is not high speed, and yet, I am out of breath.”
She’s even mad that she doesn’t have more subscribers:
[YUMI]: “At the moment, my ratings are not that satisfying.”
Been there!
YuMi has 16.3 thousand subscribers and over 750 thousand views after less than a year
on the platform.
Song A, in a little over a year, has amassed almost 26 thousand subscribers and two million
views.
And sure, I’m a lot of them, but it’s still solid.
Each of their videos is basically a game of “North Koreans: They’re Just Like Us.”
They look at flowers through a magnifying glass, they play rock paper scissors in the
pool, they get nervous on amusement park rides: [YUMI]: “To be frank with you, I am a coward.”
They even show the darker side of living under a brutal regime whose population has way too
little food and way too much slavery.
[SONG A]: “I am very hungry.”
Wow, you wouldn’t expect a propaganda channel to reference the worsening food shortage in
North Korea.
Wait, unless…
[SONG A]: “That is because we were in water.”
Oh, just from swimming.
Can’t believe I fell for that.
[SONG A]: “There is also a bad side about it, too—
Wait, maybe we’ve got something here!
[Song A]: “This year, I am going to middle school.”
That’s… actually pretty bad.
But still, daily life in North Korea isn’t what these influencers are showing us, even
for the most well-off elites.
For example, given how shoddy the country’s power supply is, that amusement park YuMi
cowarded at is probably closed most of the time.
But the big tell that these channels are state-sponsored propaganda isn’t the misleading excursions
or the semi-frequent mentions of the Supreme Leader.
It’s that they exist at all.
See, in North Korea, the internet is a privilege of the few and the literally well-connected.
Most people have none at all, while some are allowed onto a government-run intranet called
Kwangmyong which as of 2014 hosted a couple thousand highly censored websites copied over
from the real internet.
North Koreans can only access it with permission on government-made computers in highly supervised
computer labs, university libraries, and cyber cafes, and since you can’t reach it outside
of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s not the best place to launch a global influencing career.
Some people in North Korea have access to the real internet: government officials, their
relatives, and a small handful of people who need it to do their jobs like hackers, some
researchers, and propagandists—altogether, less than one percent of the population.
The country has a whopping two lines that physically connect it to the internet, one
run to China and the other to Russia, plus seemingly a couple satellite connections.
And all that infrastructure is weak, slow, and old enough that one American was able
to single-handedly break it all down for a bit last year with a series of DDoS attacks,
and not, as I’d assumed, a viral pic of Kim J.
YuMi and Song A having smartphones to film on, foreign media to fangirl about—
[SONG A]: “My favorite book is Harry Potter.”
[YUMI]: “Qatar World Cup is just around the corner.
Millions of football fans including me make personal opinions on the results as always.”
—and access to YouTube to post it all meaning they have to have a lot of permission from
and connection to the regime.
Which means that, yes, these people are worse than propagandists: they’re nepo babies.
YuMi has been linked to Sogwang, the North Korean media company responsible for a propaganda
YouTube channel that got banned in 2020, the host of which was suspected to be related
to Sogwang CEO Jon Kyong Hui and North Korea’s ambassador to China, Ri Ryong Nam.
And Song A’s dad worked at the North Korean embassy in London, her grandfather is Vice
Minister of Foreign Affairs Pak Myong Guk, and her great-grandfather is Ri Ul Sol, a
military commander so beloved by the Kim family that he got a full state funeral.
And I thought I was well connected because my dad is the guy from Wendover!
So why bother?
For ages, outward-facing North Korean propaganda looked like this.
Why the pivot to this?
[SONG A]: “It may sound bonkers to you, but in our country, Mother’s Day is on the
16th of November.”
Like just about every North Korean thing we cover on HAI, it comes down to foreign money.
Most of the world has sanctioned North Korea to bits, so their currency is nothing, so
they need foreign cash to bankroll their toy habit.
Song A and YuMi’s channels—as well as similar ones on Chinese social media sites
Weibo and Bilibili—aren’t just raking in adsense dollars from YouTube, they’re
trying to make potential tourists question the negative impression of the country they
might have from, well, the facts.
In 2018, 125 thousand foreign tourists visited North Korea—roughly the same amount that
went to San Diego Comic-Con—but the border’s been closed since January 2020.
And with their economy in even more shambles than usual thanks to COVID, the government
is trying new strategies to make North Korea seem like a safe, fun, tourist-friendly place
to go fishing or visit a water park gym when they open up again.
My two cents?
Definitely visit, assuming you have the same travel preferences as Song A:
[SONG A]: “Would you go for very scary or just scary?
I choose very scary.”
If you also choose very scary, make sure to check out this video’s sponsor: The Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea.
Just kidding.
They ignored my calls.
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