Who are North Korea’s 13 Twitter friends? | Hacker News Reader

Who are North Korea’s 13 Twitter friends?

reviewmylife.co.uk

49 pointsnbsymr14 comments

Who are the 13 Twitter users that North Korea has chosen to follow using their official uriminzok Twitter account?

Open articleView on HN

If I recall correctly, authorizing TwitPic makes you automatically follow @TwitPic and @noaheverett.

This is interesting. How do people feel about this forced following?

Note that it's not a verified account.

(Twitter no longer does new verified accounts: they consider that "beta" program "closed".)

The account's authenticity is confirmed by the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11007825

Your linked article is not really a "confirmation": the BBC talked to a professor from Tufts University who says that the government is behind the account. Alternatively, Forbes talked to Alejandro Cao de Benos (a Spaniard who runs the "Korean Friendship Association": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Cao_de_Benos_de_Les_y... ), who claimed that the government has nothing to do with it: http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/08/23/north-korea-t...

I think the most that we can say is that the evidence is inconclusive.

While is hasn't been verified, it has certainly fallen afoul of South Korean censors. I'm currently staying in Korea and I'm greeted with this http://dl.dropbox.com/u/295167/warning.png I'd say there is a decent chance that this is real.

First CNN Turns twitter into national news, now we try and make Twitter international news?

This article says nothing useful about North Korea except that they like people with similar interests (surprise).

The last North Korean Twitter account to get social media attention was fake, why wouldn't this one be?

They don't have the internet in North Korea.

Would be funny to see all the world politicians befriend each other on social networks - world peace!?

All the museums are friends! http://twitter.com/smithsonian

And all the cats: http://twitter.com/Mulder_Cat (random cat from search results).

I found it really funny when I discovered those animal subsets of Twitter.

After the huge success that was force joining of groups ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767368 ), Facebook could introduce force-friending. Applied to: small countries neighboring large and powerful ones, citizens of autocratic states (Big Brother IS your friend!)

I wonder if Alec Baldwin and the other members of the Film Actors Guild feel slighted at being passed over?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com