The entire media world is a little red faced today as we all learn, at least according to official DPRK sources, that North Korea is in fact not actively using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. This is contrary to nearly endless coverage saying the opposite from every publication that you can name.
According to a Forbes report, they contacted the hermit nation and were told the following:
A North Korea government official [told] Forbes that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is not using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as reported by thousands of publications worldwide. The accounts are run by government supporters, not government officials, living in Japan and China, not North Korea.
Those social media sites are still banned in North Korea, says the official.
Questions remain. Not to get overly political, but I do indeed wonder just how many expat fans North Korea has, and just how many might have the gumption to go ahead and make a Twitter account for their homeland. Before this, I would have said zero. Perhaps I was wrong.
Still, the North Korean government is disowning the accounts, and so for the time being they can only be regarded as hoaxes, no matter if dark money is being funneled from Pyongyang to someone offshore or not. This is actually fine by us, their Twitter account was a deathly bore.
Alex, thanks for this piece.
First, however, the fact that someone identified as a spokesperson for the DPRK/NoKo government, (and an apparently non-Korean one, at that; i.e., Mr. Alejandro Cao de Benos) has disowned of these accounts doesn’t mean that they’re still not behind them, with or without one or more degrees of separation.
Second, neither the discussions here nor in the original Forbes piece appear to make reference to the Twitter @DPRK_News account, but only to the third-party @uriminzok @ and (now-suspended) @KCNA_DPRK ones.
So, is @DPRK_News authentic? It claims to be, even though it suspiciously hasn’t been updated since 2009, nor does it bear the blue Twitter “verified” badge. That said, there’s little to suggest that it’s a parody, either, from the old-school Marxist denunciations (“UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon blasted as US stooge!’) to the apparently irony-free, self-serious proclamations of news items like: “Chunbyoo collective farm triples production of goats, providing nutritious meat and milk for nourishment of Chagang-Do province.”