A recently smuggled mobile phone has offered a chilling look into the extreme censorship and surveillance system in North Korea under Kim Jong Un’s regime, highlighting how the state ruthlessly controls and polices digital communication to eliminate any trace of foreign—particularly South Korean—influence.
According to a BBC investigation, the censorship is so deep-rooted that North Korean smartphones are designed to autocorrect or censor commonly used South Korean words and replace them with propaganda-friendly terminology. For example:
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The popular Korean word “Oppa” (a term of endearment for boyfriends or older male figures in South Korea) is automatically changed to “Comrade”.
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A warning on the phone states: “This word can only be used to refer to siblings”, enforcing the regime’s interpretation.
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Typing “South Korea” leads the phone to automatically replace it with “Puppet State”, reflecting Pyongyang's stance that the South is a US-controlled entity.
Even more disturbingly, the phone secretly takes screenshots every five minutes, storing them in an invisible folder only accessible to state authorities. This mechanism allows North Korea’s surveillance system to silently monitor citizens’ activities, turning their own devices into tools of oppression.
North Korean communication technology — from radios to smartphones — is locked, sealed, and pre-configured to receive only government-sanctioned content. Tampering with devices to access the internet or outside media is considered a serious criminal offense, often punished with imprisonment or execution.
A report based on testimonies from 649 North Korean defectors paints a grim picture of life under this regime:
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Authorities routinely inspect phones for slang, contact names, and language patterns that might indicate exposure to South Korean culture.
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K-pop and K-dramas are strictly banned.
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Consumption or distribution of foreign content, especially South Korean media, is met with harsh consequences.
One particularly harrowing case highlighted in South Korea’s Unification Ministry’s human rights report involved a 22-year-old North Korean man who was publicly executed for listening to and sharing K-pop music and South Korean films.
This insight into the regime’s digital control underscores Kim Jong Un’s intensifying war on foreign influence, especially from the South, whose global cultural appeal poses a growing threat to the ideological purity that the North Korean government enforces with fear, surveillance, and violence.
