Six or seven years ago — when hoverboards were still Casey Neistat’s primary mode of transportation, YouTubers published books they barely wrote and famous internet personalities identified as “creators” instead of “influencers” — a niche group of travel vloggers ventured to North Korea and posted about it.
For decades, North Korea has invited foreign journalists into their country, but not without taking extreme precautions to ensure Western media coverage doesn’t chafe against the idealized, harmonious propaganda the country promotes. After exiting customs, North Korean officials distributed a 10-page document to a delegation of 130 foreign journalists visiting the country in 2018 for the 70th anniversary of its founding. The document outlines the rules and regulations surrounding foreign journalism, which explicitly outlawed “distorting realities,” “violating stability and common interests of (North Korean) society” and “violating the interests of (North Korea) and its citizens and defaming the latter.” Defiance of these laws, according to this document, constitutes a criminal act and is publishable by up to 10 years in “reform through labor.”
These are anything but empty threats. Two American journalists were detained in 2009 and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor after publishing critical observations of North Korea in 2009. In 2016, a BBC journalist was detained and interrogated for 10 hours after visiting a hospital and claiming, “Everything we see looks like a setup.”
However, unlike the journalists who have risked punishment to maintain a strict code of ethics that demands truth, accuracy, independence and impartiality, YouTubers operate under a different ethos. YouTubers have never really denied that what you see on camera is vastly different from what happens in real life.
Long-time YouTuber and former Buzzfeed employee Steph Frosch claimed that, “People are only seeing an act. They don’t see the panic attacks people have, they don’t see people losing relationships because they always have to be on their phone, they don’t see that side of it … These young kids, they just want to see these people they aspire to be having these successful, lavish lives, and thinking they can have that too.”
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that in 2016 — the same year they detained the BBC journalist — the North Korean government started inviting YouTubers to document their highly-choreographed visits. After all, there were truly no better candidates to share romanticized portrayals of North Korea than vloggers who built their platform on deluding viewers into buying their fake, idealized fantasies.
Enter Louis Cole of FunForLouis, a 39-year-old travel vlogger who’s been documenting his global adventures since 2012. Cole traveled to North Korea with an organization that runs surf camps for local tour guides and children. But well before his feet reach the sand, Cole documents a carefully-choreographed tour of Pyongyang, which highlights the decidedly fun aspects of North Korean life: Cole rides a massive slide at a crowded water park, he lets the bellboy at a swanky hotel ride his skateboard, at one moment the waitresses at his dinner service are serving food and the next they’re singing and dancing. He goes to the library and marvels at a copy of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” that he’s shown (flag that for later), he rides his skateboard to upbeat lo-fi tunes and he turns an English class into a dance party complete with a conga line and everything. Cole provides few indications that North Korea is unlike any of the other exciting, lovable and “awesome” countries Cole visits year-round.
But even when Cole does encounter abnormalities between him and the North Korean citizens he befriends, it becomes a spectacle rather than a cause for concern. While recording a North Korean woman’s vocals, Cole’s American musician friend Lane Terzieff tells her to “pretend you’re Justin Bieber,” to which the North Korean woman replies, “Huh, sorry?” Cole and Terzieff laugh as the North Korean woman stares at them in complete confusion. Terzieff says, “Wait a minute, do you know who Justin Bieber is?” She shakes her head and says, “Beaver?” Stunned, Terzieff looks at the camera and says, “Wow, this is awesome.”
By his eighth vlog in the country, Cole adds a disclaimer at the beginning of his video after garnering criticism for his idealized portrayal of North Korea. In it, he states: “Please do your own research on North Korea and watch these vlogs as part of a broader narrative. My aim is to show the beautiful people that live here and help strengthen the fragile bridge of peace and diplomacy through surfing. This was an organized tour showing only some places in the country and I’m sharing what we were shown.”
This disclaimer harkens back to a passing comment Cole made at the end of his first vlog, where he claims that “Obviously, I can only share and show you guys what we’re getting shown. And there may be a whole other side to different things that we’re not getting to explore here but that’s the same in a lot of countries we visit. So I’m just gonna focus on the really cool things we see and the really positive stuff.”
Ironically, just moments after making this claim, he jokes with his friend about how “They might be listening now.” Grinning, Cole adds, “If you’re listening, good job. I love the country so far. Great place. I’m happy to be here.”
According to a report from Human Rights Watch from 2022, North Korea “remains one of the most repressive countries in the world.” Under the authoritarian regime of Kim Jong Un, the government participates in efforts to prohibit pluralism by banning all forms of free expression, peaceful assembly, association as well as religious and secular belief. The government maintains “fearful obedience” by sending dissenters to “kwanliso,” a network of North Korea’s secret political prison camps where prisoners are subjected to “torture and other ill-treatment, starvation rations and forced labor.” In addition to wielding “threats of torture, extrajudicial expectations, wrongful imprisonment, enforced disappearances and forced hard labor” to silence disobedience, the North Korean government also fails to uphold the economic rights of its people by sustaining its economy through compulsory uncompensated labor, which the government thinly disguises as “portrayals of loyalty.” The resulting impoverishment limits the people’s access to health, food and adequate standards of living. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme revealed that 10.9 million North Koreans, or 42.4% of the population, are food insecure.
Cole was evidently aware of the problematic side of North Korea’s oppressive, dictatorial regime. However, in an effort to maintain his brand of easy-going, adventurous, synthetically optimistic content, he ignored it. How convenient.
In 2022, North Korea surpassed its previous efforts to exploit YouTube as a platform for highly-idealized content. Instead of targeting foreign YouTubers as the vehicles of propagandistic messaging, the government curated its own group of North Korean influencers who document their everyday lives. On the surface, Song A is like any other eleven-year-old girl. In her first video, entitled “I am Song A,” she introduces herself as a fifth-year primary school student from Pyongyang. She proclaims that her favorite book is “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling. Remember, this is the book series Cole is shown when he visits the public library on his tour of Pyongyang. This choice was calculated. Unsurprisingly, when Song A holds up her copy, it’s in mint condition — the spine isn’t cracked and the pages aren’t even dog-eared. For someone who claims this is her favorite book, it hardly looks like she read it. But none of this matters — by merely planting this book on Song A, the producers of this video make the consumption of foreign media look like a reality that’s accessible to most North Koreans, when in reality nothing could be farther from the truth. In 2020, the North Korean government passed an “anti-reactionary thought” law, which made smuggling, distributing or encouraging the group viewing of foreign media from “hostile” countries punishable by “reform through labor for life or the death penalty.” Upon closer inspection, Song A’s copy of the novel was printed in China and includes both Chinese and English text. By this fact alone, Song A isn’t the rule but the exception.
If it wasn’t clear by the first video that the producers of Song A’s videos have subtly infused positive North Korean messaging into her content, by her second video, it’s blatantly obvious. In “Quarantined at Home,” she contracts COVID-19 alongside her mother and expresses her concerns about recovering because “the medicine was running out.” As though it was an act of divine, or rather state, intervention, two military doctors show up to Song A’s door in the nick of time. Alongside clips of the men administering medication, Song A’s narration paints them as saviors: “They were here to deliver medicine to all of the people who were sick. At that moment, me and my mom just cried and cried like a baby. Then after three or four days later, we recovered. So from that time on, they became like my brothers.” Song A’s swift triumph over COVID-19 with the aid of her uniformed “brothers” stands in stark contrast to the many North Korean children who died because the virus exacerbated their poor nutrition and they were given adult doses of prescription drugs like Paracetamol and Dimedrol. Not to mention, Kim refused to vaccinate the population because the vaccines North Korea received were donated by China.
In her third video, Song A ventures to Okryu Children’s Hospital because even though she could’ve gone to a local clinic to treat the “corn on my toe,” her “heart was pumping with desire of going (here). So I have begged my mom to come here … to look at the pictures more than to be cured.” The pictures she’s referring to consist of cartoony state-sponsored imagery that line the walls of the hospital. Along with b-roll of the empty hospital, the camera alternates from a frontal selfie view of Song A to clips of someone literally filming her while she vlogs with a selfie stick. If the scripted formality of her voice wasn’t enough to suggest that this isn’t just an eleven-year-old girl vlogging her daily life, these third-person views of Song A demonstrate how these are full-scale productions. This fact is further evidenced by the selective censorship of people’s identities. In some shots, including one in this video, a random passerby appears to be completely blurred out. This occurs in contrast to other unidentified individuals in the background whose appearances are completely unobstructed. If some individuals are blurred and others aren’t, then perhaps these visits to public places are entirely staged. The camera, therefore, only shows those who have been strategically placed in the frame. The way that the people in the background interact with the camera serves as further confirmation of this theory. To them, the camera is practically invisible. There are only a few instances in which someone other than Song A is staring at the camera. If you’ve watched any vlogger in public, you’d know this is abnormal.
The rest of Song A’s videos portray North Korea in a tone not unlike Cole’s: She has fun at the same water park, she eats shaved ice at a local store, she soaks in beautiful scenery at Moran Hill, she goes to school for the first time without a mask and she visits a 4D cinema at the Great Hall of Science and Technology. North Korea through Song A’s eyes is exceedingly fun, even normal.
To maintain this illusion of normalcy, the editors of Song A’s videos even went so far as to blur out a family portrait that briefly appears in the background of one of her videos. They did this because Song A is related to famous members of the North Korean elite. Her father is a diplomat who worked in the North Korean embassy in London. Her grandfather is currently the vice minister of foreign affairs. And finally, her great-grandfather was a high-ranking military commander who was in charge of guarding the Kim family. There’s not a single instance in any of Song A’s videos where she alludes to her family background. However, her family’s close ties to the government lead many experts to believe that Song A’s videos are produced by a North Korean propaganda agency.
Despite her status, the efforts on the part of North Korean producers to portray Song A as an average girl harken back to the reason why they appropriated vlogging as a form of state propaganda in the first place. Vlogging creates the impression of authenticity through low-production value and close face-to-face interaction between the viewer and the vlogger. Through vlogging, Song A’s videos don’t only portray this highly-idealized North Korea as normal but also authentic. What’s more, Song A’s videos appear on YouTube Kids, a platform for kids to freely access exclusively family-friendly content. It’s scary to think about how adolescent viewers probably can’t differentiate Song A from the other vloggers they watch. In this way, YouTube represents a new age of propaganda where the state can not only normalize idealized depictions of their country but also market this vision to an audience of increasingly younger viewers.
Daily Arts Contributor Bela Kellogg can be reached at bkellogg@umich.edu.