North and South Korea are technically still at war, and although it has been years since either side shelled the other, the two sides are fighting on a more subtle front: a war of information. The South tries to get information into the North, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un tries furiously to block it, as he attempts to shield his people from outside information.
North Korea is the only country in the world the internet has not penetrated. All TV channels, radio stations and newspapers are run by the state. "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," says Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, and an expert in North Korean technology and information. Expose those lies to enough people and the regime could come crumbling down, is how the thinking in South Korea goes.
A small number of broadcasters and non-profit organisations transmit information into the country in the dead of night on short and medium radio waves, so North Koreans can tune in to listen in secret. Thousands of USB sticks and micro-SD cards are also smuggled over the border every month loaded with foreign information - among them, South Korean films, TV dramas, and pop songs, as well as news, all designed to challenge North Korean propaganda. Every month, a team at Unification Media Group (UMG), a South Korean non-profit organisation, sift through the latest news and entertainment offerings to put together playlists that they hope will resonate with those in the North. They then load them onto devices, which are categorised according to how risky they are to view. On low-risk USBs are South Korean TV dramas and pop songs - recently they included a Netflix romance series When Life Give You Tangerines, and a hit from popular South Korean singer and rapper Jennie. High-risk options include what the team calls "education programmes" – information to teach North Koreans about democracy and human rights, the content Kim is thought to fear the most. The drives are then sent to the Chinese border, where UMG's trusted partners carry them across the river into North Korea at huge risk.
Kim Jong Un, all too aware of this risk to his regime, is fighting back. During the pandemic, he built new electric fences along the border with China, making it more difficult for information to be smuggled in. And new laws introduced from 2020 have increased the punishments for people who are caught consuming and sharing foreign media. One stated that those who distribute the content could be imprisoned or executed. This has had a chilling effect. "This media used to be available to buy in markets, people would openly sell it, but now you can only get it from people you trust. Recently Kim has also cracked down on behaviour that could be associated with watching K-dramas. In 2023 he made it a crime for people to use South Korean phrases or speak in a South Korean accent. In late 2024, a North Korean mobile phone was smuggled out of the country by Daily NK, (Seoul-based media organisation UMG's news service).The phone had been programmed so that when a South Korean variant of a word is entered, it automatically vanishes, replaced with the North Korean equivalent - an Orwellian move. "Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people", says Mr Williams. Following all these crackdown measures, he believes North Korea is now "starting to gain the upper hand" in this information war.
Not only is Kim cracking down hard on those caught with foreign content, but the future of this work could be in jeopardy. Much of it is funded by the US government, and has been hit by US President Donald Trump's recent aid cuts. Following Donald Trump's return to the White House earlier this year, funds were severed to a number of aid organisations, including some working to inform North Koreans. He also suspended funds to two federally financed news services, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America (VOA), which had been broadcasting nightly into North Korea. Trump accused VOA of being "radical" and anti-Trump", while the White House said the move would "ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda". But Steve Herman, a former VOA bureau chief based in Seoul, argues: "This was one of the very few windows into the world the North Korean people had, and it has gone silent with no explanation. "UMG is still waiting to find out whether their funding will be permanently cut.
Mr Park from Liberty in North Korea argues Trump has "incidentally" given Kim a helping hand, and calls the move "short-sighted". He argues that North Korea, with its expanding collection of nuclear weapons, poses a major security threat - and that given sanctions, diplomacy and military pressure have failed to convince Kim to denuclearise, information is the best remaining weapon. "We're not just trying to contain the threat of North Korea, we're trying to solve it," he argues. "To do that you need to change the nature of the country. "If I was an American general I'd be saying 'how much does this stuff cost, and actually that's a pretty good use of our resources'".
The question that remains is, who should fund this work. Some question why it has fallen almost entirely to the US. One solution could be for South Korea to foot the bill - but the issue of North Korea is heavily politicised here. Yet Mr Park remains hopeful. "The good thing is that the North Korean government can't go into people's heads and take out the information that's been building for years," he points out. And as technologies develop, he is confident that spreading information will get easier. "In the long run I really believe this is going to be the thing that changes North Korea".
- Reported by Kanta Kumari
Intern at the Korean Academy
Korean news analysis and reporting
