The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is from 6 years ago, so they’ve probably only improved their surveillance)
The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is from 6 years ago, so they’ve probably only improved their surveillance)
Episode 71: Information Monopoly
However, the article is more geared towards media censorship and control.
I’d like to see a conversation comparing censorship and the fight against “disinformation” in NK vs in the USA
Disinformation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea can be anything that goes against any official line. In the US disinformation can also be things (but not all things) that go against the official government line, v.g: Covid, elections, official promulgations, fact checks, etc.
It can be difficult to mark a difference, but it's safe to say that at least as of now, fewer things would be marked disinformation in the US despite the new DHS office that would appear to ape how soviet systems (such as DPRK) would deal with what they deem misinformation.
For example a Russian protester being detained for displaying an empty poster, doesn't tell us a lot about the specific believes of the person with the poster, but a lot about the people who react to such a thing by robbing that persons freedom by claiming it was desinformation (which it wasn't, it was a symbolic act of protest).
On the other hand if someone claims vaccines are a evil plot to inject nanobots into our bloodstreams to track everybodies position, this would be desinformation even without any state entity ever reacting to it. It tells a lot about the believe systems and world view of the person claiming such things, but it doesn't necessarily relate a lot to actual policy out there.
A third thing would be strategic denounciations like the ones the Nazis used when they coined ther term "Lügenpresse" which translates to "lie-press" or more modern: "fake media". This is used as a form of preventative denounciation. So the act of calling things disinformation before it is even clear what is said in order to weaken it's credibility once it is said and to create an incentive for their followers to only listen to them, not to others. This of course tells also more about the entity who calls something desinformation than about the receipients of such labels which can be wildly different people and organisations.