A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea has revealed the regime’s extreme censorship from the outside world.
North Korea is currently overseen by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, with his Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) ruling the country since the party’s creation in 1948.
Ever since then, the country has built up a reputation of being difficult to get into, while citizens who’ve managed to leave have since given a window into what life in North Korea is like.
BBC News investigated how North Korea was implementing censorship tactics by examining a smartphone that was smuggled out of the country last year.
At first glance, the mobile device doesn’t look any different from those found in the US, but a quick look at its features reveals it’s quite different.
The phone was smuggled out of North Korea last year (TikTok/BBC)
The BBC found that the phone took a screenshot every five minutes, with the images stored in a secret folder inaccessible to the phone’s user and accessible only to authorities.
Some words are restricted on the phone, too, as journalist Jean Mackenzie typed the word ‘oppa’ into the mobile phone.
While that does technically mean older brother in Korean, South Korean slang often refers to a person’s boyfriend as well.
But the phone instantly corrected the word to ‘comrade’, revealing North Korea’s thoughts on the slang term, with it only allowing the term to be used to ‘describe your siblings’.
And if you’d type South Korea into the phone, then the BBC investigation found it would automatically correct to ‘puppet state’ instead, which Mackenzie says is what the North ‘calls the South’.
Over the years, South Korea has attempted to get their media past North Korea’s strict censorship, with USBs containing South Korean TV dramas and music being smuggled through a variety of unusual methods, such as bottles being floated across the border.
It would change words deemed to be South Korean slang (TikTok/BBC)
The crackdown on what media is consumed in the country is said to be incredibly extreme, with media reporting last year that 30 teenagers were executed for watching South Korean dramas.
Martyn Williams, an expert in North Korean technology and information, said to the BBC: “Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people.
“The reason for this control is that so much of the mythology around the Kim family is made up. A lot of what they tell people is lies.”
Meanwhile, Kang Gyuri, a North Korean dissident, spoke to BBC News after she escaped the regime in 2023 to live in exile in South Korea.
Recalling what it was like to live in North Korea, Gyuri said: “I felt so suffocated, and I suddenly had an urge to leave.
“I used to think it was normal that the state restricted us so much. I thought other countries lived with this control. But then I realized it was only in North Korea.”
