N. Korean Propaganda Appears on Popular Internet Social Media sites

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Kok Leng Yeo

Steve Herman | Voice of America | October 2010

North Korean propaganda has emerged on popular Internet social media sites. It is not for domestic consumption as virtually no North Korean has Internet access. Rather it is targeted at other countries, especially South Korea. But in the democratic South, considered the world’s most connected country, the government blocks such content.

South Korea’s Internet censors are working harder these days to keep up with an expanding number of Web sites showing material from or sympathetic to North Korea.

South Korea blocks such sites under laws forbidding dissemination of false information or activities against the state.

Bloggers such as Kim Sang-bum, of the on-line community Bloter, which focuses on digital technology, calls the censorship an over-reaction.

“I don’t think it is necessary for our government to regulate citizens too tightly. South Koreans have become too sophisticated to fall for North Korean propaganda,” he said. “We consider that kind of propaganda as rather silly.”

South Korea’s Communications Standards Commission and the National Police Agency declined requests for interviews.

Jeon Kyoung-woong is the former director of the Korea Internet Media Association, and an on-line journalist. Jeon says pro-Pyongyang material needs to be restricted because it is not as innocuous.

“There are actually forces inside South Korea supporting the North Korean regime,” he said. “Some of them are in touch with North Korean spy groups. Thus the South Korean government sets restrictions on such on-line content.”

South Korean Internet users must register with their real names. On the most popular web sites, anyone posting comments must register with their national identity number.

“The adoption of real-name system shows that the current government is excessively sensitive about political opinion on the Internet. I think the situation has become worse since the current government came into power.”

Jeon, however, is less bothered.

“South Korean cyber police has been active for more than a decade,” said Jeon. “Recently it feels like the cyber police are becoming increasingly active but that is only because it’s being publicized by those subject to such restrictions. Political restrictions were actually tighter under the previous two governments.”

While South Koreans can freely argue about to what degree on-line content here should be regulated, that is not an option in North Korea. Only a few people there are allowed Internet access. And the country only recently established its first full connection to the Internet.

Beijing officials trained in social media: report

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Tim Yang

AFP | October 14, 2010

BEIJING — Beijing city officials are being trained to use China’s fast-growing social media scene in the latest government move to guide and monitor public opinion, state media said Thursday.

The city’s Communist Party school is offering the training to “bureau-level leading cadres” to help “leaders catch up with Internet currents”, the Legal Evening News said.

The training will “raise cadres’ understanding of information dissemination, and social and public sentiment in order to better respond to sudden crises,” it said.

Chinese blogs, chat rooms and other sites have become lively outlets for expression in a country where traditional media are tightly controlled and where activists say freedom of speech is curtailed.

In particular, Twitter-like micro-blogging sites have grown fast, with tens of millions of people believed to have opened accounts in the past year alone.

The training at the Beijing party school — which is separate from the Communist Party’s national-level school, also based in Beijing — will focus on micro-blogging, the news report said.

It will include “what is micro-blogging; how to browse blogs and micro-blogs; what is MSN all about; which BBS (bulletin board system) sites and posts are most popular; and which search engines to use to find hot topics in society”.

These subjects “have all become knowledge that leaders must cram on,” it said. It lauded leaders who have “acted to set up their own blogs and issued blog entries”.

China operates a vast censorship system, deleting Web content considered a possible challenge to the ruling Communist Party, such as mentions of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded last week to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo.

But it has also worked to stay ahead of the curve by harnessing online and social media as propaganda tools.

Some local governments have set up micro-blog accounts to get their message out, and the central government recently set up a website for citizens to express their views to the nation’s top leaders.

Chinese web users frequently refer to the “50 cent army”, rumoured to be a group of freelance propagandists who post pro-Communist Party entries on blogs and websites, posing as ordinary members of the public.

North Korea creates Twitter and YouTube presence

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Josh Berglund

By Clark Boyd | The World | August 17, 2010

It is common to use words like “reclusive” and “secretive” when writing about North Korea.

But last Thursday, the North Koreans created a Twitter account – @uriminzok, a shortened version of a Korean word that translates as “our people”.

It already has more than 4,500 followers.

The move to Twitter follows last month’s launch of a North Korean YouTube channel, which now hosts close to 80 videos.

“The North Koreans are technologically literate,” says Hazel Smith, a long-time North Korea researcher at Cranfield University in Britain.

Ms Smith says that the North Koreans have been investing heavily in information technology now for more than 20 years.

“They have a cadre of people who can use modern social networking sites. But the problem for them is the content,” she said.

On the North Korean YouTube channel, that content includes a lot of propaganda laced with bombastic rhetoric; the United States and South Korea are often called “warmongers”.

In a recent Twitter post, the North Koreans said the current administration in South Korea was “a prostitute” of the US.

“As far as content goes, there’s nothing new as far as I can tell,” says Sung-Yoon Lee, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston.

Mr Lee says that the agency responsible for the videos and the tweets is a major arm of the country’s ruling communist party.

“They’ve been putting out stuff like this for years now,” said Mr Lee.

‘Government’s voice’

The irony is that the vast majority of North Korea’s 23 million people have no Internet access, and therefore cannot follow their own government’s social networking sites.

And even if they could follow, they would not be allowed to use social media to criticize the regime, says Gilles Lordet, chief editor of Reporters without Borders in Paris.

“There is absolutely no press freedom at all in North Korea, no independent media,” Mr Lordet said. “There is only the government, the voice of the regime.”

For now, North Korea’s online offerings are only in Korean.

But Professor Lee thinks that they might soon expand their offerings to include video clips and posts in English.

“The North Koreans already produce propaganda material in English, through the Korean Central News Agency,” he said. “They have the wherewithal to do it.”

He added: “It will just take them a little more time and effort.”

PRI’s The World is a co-production between the BBC World Service, WGBH Boston, and Public Radio International. It is heard on public radio stations across the US and on-line at theworld.org.

China’s plan to use internet for propaganda

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Clemson

By John Garnaut | Sydney Morning Herald | July 14, 2010

BEIJING: The Chinese Communist Party has detailed its ambitious but secretive strategy for transforming the internet into a force for keeping it in power and projecting ”soft power” abroad.

An internal speech by China’s top internet official, apparently posted by accident on an official internet site before being promptly removed, outlines a vast array of institutions and methods to control opinion at home and also ”create an international public opinion environment that is objective, beneficial and friendly to us”.

”Those efforts provided powerful public opinion support for unifying thinking, consolidating strength, assisting in our diplomatic battles and safeguarding our national interests,” said Wang Chen, who is deputy director of the Propaganda Department, head of External (foreign) Propaganda and also director of the State Council’s Information Office.

Mr Wang’s speech was made to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on April 29 and posted on the Congress’s website on May 4, before being removed, sanitised and re-posted on a more mainstream government website the following day. It was picked up by Human Rights in China and included in its report released yesterday, China’s Internet: Staking Digital Ground.

”China has this goal of establishing a Chinese intranet, removing China from the global internet, and you can see that in this report,” said Anne-Marie Brady, an expert on China’s propaganda system at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. ”The average Chinese person knows basically how the propaganda system works but there’s no need to advertise so blatantly what the government is doing,” she said, explaining why large sections of the original speech were deleted.

Rather than shut off China to the outside world, the Communist Party has maintained its authoritarian rule in the information age by vastly expanding its propaganda apparatus and modernising its methods and messages. The country’s 400 million internet users are ”guided” towards government-friendly information and away from ”harmful” content but can nevertheless access and spread information far more easily than previous generations.

Mr Wang said the internet ”has increased the government’s capabilities in social management” but also brought new subversive threats. ”As long as our country’s internet is linked to the global internet, there will be channels and means for all sorts of harmful foreign information to appear on our domestic internet,” Mr Wang said. He outlined how the party has used internet platforms to ”markedly strengthen” its capability to promote messages overseas.

”These foreign language channels are becoming an important force in countering the hegemony of Western media and in bolstering our country’s soft power,” he said.

The Communist Party’s ”great firewall” blocks most overseas Chinese-language websites and many foreign-language overseas sites, and local internet companies must vigilantly screen and censor sensitive content.

Official censors, commercial internet operators and informal public opinion leaders – derisively labelled as China’s ”50 cent” army for the fees they receive per posting – are also deployed to push the government line on sensitive issues.

”Government agencies at all levels … have gradually built mechanisms to guide public opinion through integrating the functions of propaganda departments,” Mr Wang said.