Propaganda from North Korea on Youtube: The North Korean Un A shows scenes from Pyongyang on the “Echo of Truth” channel – her last post appeared in December.
Pyongyang – She explained how North Korea is fighting the corona virus and took viewers on a shopping spree through Pyongyang. The vlogger Un A was the first Youtuber in the country. But there have been no new videos from her for months. According to the South Korean news portal “NK News”, Youtube shut down Un A’s channel “Echo of Truth” at the beginning of the month. Political backgrounds are presumed.
Un A had always presented itself in perfect English in its videos in a modern way, imitating western influencers. She, who described herself as a “normal girl,” made propaganda in her own way.
North Korea: Un A’s Youtube channel was closely linked to King Jong-un’s leadership
“Un A was a young, social media savvy person who knew how to create popular content and who briefly seemed to offer a unique inside look at a closed society,” said Meredith Shaw, researcher in North Korean culture at the Tokyo University’s Department of Social Sciences. compared to “NK News”. In view of the “casual, for standard propaganda a little unworthy” content, their disappearance was not exactly unexpected.
Rachel Minyoung Lee of 38 North told NK News that the country saw Un A’s videos as a relatively effective, inexpensive way to improve North Korea’s public image. The contributions really tried to “show people that North Korea is a normal country where normal people live.”
Lee assumes that Pyongyang production company Sogwang Media has scaled back the format for political reasons. According to research by “NK News”, Sogwang Media is closely connected to North Korea’s leadership around Kim Jong-un.
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According to her, there is a connection between the end of the Un A videos and the recent party conference in January. It is likely that North Korea had reviewed its propaganda policy in the run-up to the party congress and began to revise its strategies in all areas. At the end of January this year, the former head of the propaganda department, Ri II Hwan, was replaced.
Shaw also believes that politics may have been behind Sogwang’s fall. She believes that some younger North Korean elites who are “desperate” to modernize North Korean media and pop culture to compete with the South may have been pushed aside by established officials.
North Korea: Experts suspect political reasons for the disappearance of Youtuberin
But there could be many other reasons for Un A’s disappearance: “Maybe there was an argument over some minor English phrasing, or maybe they didn’t like the tone of the foreign media coverage, or maybe a relative in the party fell out of favor,” speculates Shaw .
Sogwang still appears to be in operation. New videos present a mix of government propaganda and content about daily life. As reported by “NK News”, they are uploaded a few times a month on Chinese social media sites and also with English subtitles on their “New DPRK” YouTube channel.
“It’s just unfortunate that these social media experiments with Pyongyang never seem to last very long,” Shaw said in an interview with “NK News”. “It would certainly give us more interesting content for analysis.” (Uf)
