Introduction - The Ban

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Shortly after midday on the 27th of February, we heard something very odd from YouTube, our documentary, MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea had been blocked in South Korea, not because of the usual issues that could cause a video to be taken down on YouTube like copyright or a community guidelines strike, but because of “a legal complaint from a government agency”.

This caused no problems for us in terms of our standing with YouTube, it didn’t get in the way of monetisation or anything else, and internationally the video is still up, but in this one country, South Korea, the video is gone, there was no explanation provided of what law we had seemingly broken to cause this.

Hello Cheecken,

We have received a legal complaint from a government agency regarding your content. After review, the following content has been blocked and can no longer be played on the YouTube country websites listed below:

Video: MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea

The content has been blocked and can no longer be played on the following YouTube country websites:

• South Korea

If you believe your content has been restricted in error, you can contact us. The form can only be submitted once per video URL.

YouTube may remove content to comply with local laws. For more information about legal complaints, see this help article. Here’s how to fix the problem.

Best regards The YouTube team

This was bizarre for several reasons, firstly the documentary was by this point 2 years old and hadn’t really exploded viewership wise, at the time of the ban it was sitting at roughly 4000 views, so why a government agency would suddenly take an interest in it was a mystery.

Another thing that made this all puzzling was why the South Koreans were taking an interest in what we had to say at all, the documentary is an English language production with no dubbing or subtitles for other languages like Korean, so we never promoted the documentary to South Korean audiences, it’s not even in their language!

Our ideas - Too radical?

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Content wise, it’s also hard to see what makes the documentary so unacceptable to the South Korean government that would warrant a block, the documentary obviously isn’t some kind of North Korean propaganda piece.

Although we did make points that go out of the norm for the conversation around North Korea (or as it’s officially called, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea - DPRK), such as:

• Saying that a lot of history we think we know about North Korea is distorted

• Pointing out that defector testimonies about North Korea are often sensationalistic or unreliable

• Arguing that the policy of sanctions against the country doesn’t work and isn’t justifiable

• Arguing that the country’s government is often unfairly blamed for the country’s famine¹ and the failure to resolve the nuclear issue².

And while these are points that caused some Communists and sympathisers of the DPRK to promote the documentary and take an interest in it, we never endorsed or promoted the country’s ideology, its leaders or its ruling system.

And that’s for a simple reason, we don’t believe in it, it’s not a system we would want to live under, a one party state with a single ruling ideology that dominates the country’s culture, where other political tendencies can’t exist and where you have to put immense trust and power into that state as a guide of your life, as part of a “single minded unity”, that’s a system that would be totally alien to us.

And you can kind of gather that we aren’t fellow travellers³ of Communism or the North when you look at some of the content in the documentary, as an example of why sanctions are a bad thing we cited the Soviet Union’s blockade on West Berlin and the humanitarian impact of that policy, and one of the points we made about how damaging Yeonmi’s lies were was that they were actually emboldening the DPRK’s propaganda narrative, as they used her inconsistencies to delegitimise defector testimonies, meaning that real stories defectors might tell in the future could be lost because of the skepticism caused by people like Yeonmi.

We are basically both believers in the current model in our own countries, or at least the ideal of it: Competitive elections, freedom of speech and expression, freedom to go against the orthodoxy. We don’t think the systems we live under are perfect, not at all, for my part I think democracy needs to be deepened much further and that there needs to be far more mechanisms for accountability before it becomes credible,

MEGA: Representism - Deconstructing our Faux Democracies

3 July 2024·27354 words·129 mins· loading · loading

Elwood

but I can speak for both of us when I say our ideals are much closer to what we currently live under than to the system in the DPRK.

However, we didn’t make that point in the documentary because we believe that it’s not our place to tell the people in the North what system they should live under, we feel that if they don’t have any interest in living like us and they want to live with a totally different configuration of rights to our own then that’s their choice to make.

To be clear, I understand that you can’t make an informed choice between totalitarianism and democracy, because under totalitarianism you don’t have freedom of information.

People in the DPRK can only legally learn about the South or competing ideologies from affiliates of the state, who will obviously paint an extremely biased picture, those who try to learn about these alternatives from other unsanctioned sources are running the risk of serious consequences for themselves.

However, I do believe the majority of North Koreans support or at least accept the current system, despite constant predictions of collapse from foreign sources over the years the state there seems very stable, without any serious organised opposition emerging (that we know of). I don’t believe the DPRK would have survived the Cold War and the extreme pressure imposed on it by sanctions if it didn’t have public endorsement of some kind.

Given that there’s no way to independently poll North Koreans and that the only sources of information on their views (other than the biased state media) are defectors (who are also biased in the other direction and can only paint a small picture of their personal experiences at best) there’s no way of knowing for certain, but that’s what I believe.

The focus of the documentary was also not really on evaluating North Korea as a country, we weren’t trying to demonise or promote it, we were trying to explore how our media in the Western world (the UK, the EU, the US, and the media of other countries like South Korea) portray it.

But although we didn’t spell out our own ideology in the documentary itself in a followup video posted shortly after the documentary was uploaded Massi made a point of explaining that we aren’t Communists or believers in Juche⁴, we’re non partisan and open minded:

Our belief that we shouldn’t just accept unreliable sensationalist stories about the DPRK, or that we think the North Koreans should be left alone rather than being pressured by a military or economic stranglehold, doesn’t mean we’re supporters of that system ourselves.

Also, we did criticise South Korea, pointing out that its tendency to treat North Koreans with hostility or suspicion, leaving them living like second class citizens, was creating the “celebrity defector” phenomenon, where defectors from the North would exaggerate their stories to appeal to the press and become media personalities because other career paths weren’t so open to them, and we also called out South Korean tabloids as the source for a lot of misinformation about the North as they produced stories that were either poorly researched or seemingly completely made up, and we talked about some of the dark elements of South Korea’s early history that were forgotten or overlooked in the West, the fact that South Korea was until fairly recently a dictatorship and that the country’s leaders had swept some of the crimes of Korea’s former colonisers, the Japanese, under the rug.

But none of this was about aligning ourselves with North Korea against South Korea, we simply wanted to show that the situation with the two Koreas wasn’t black and white and encourage people to see the shades of grey, because in the popular imagination in our corner of the world South Korea is seen as a shining beacon of prosperity while North Korea is seen as a cartoonishly evil, self destructive dump run by madmen, and we don’t think that image is accurate when you look at the facts; We showed the sources we used to come to that conclusion in the credits and throughout the production, none of those sources were from the North and very few of them were from its fellow travellers.

So maybe our viewpoint isn’t the most flattering towards the South Korean government, or one they would particularly want you to hear, but it’s far from something so hostile that you could play devil’s advocate and say okay, I can see why they would see this as something so bad their people can’t be exposed to it.

A spooky conspiracy?

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But even if it was that hostile, the question that again comes up is, why would they even care about us? How did they even find out about the documentary, and why would they see it as problematic enough to get rid of?

Well, throughout the day, after the block happened, I decided to do some searching around the internet to see if there was any news about South Korea cracking down on certain types of content, at first I didn’t find much but after a while I found this, a Twitter post from a YouTuber called NatalieRevolts showing the same kind of blocking message:

I knew of Natalie because she was one of the North Korea sympathisers that had taken an interest in our documentary back around the time it came out, not only was she getting the same kind of blocking message we did, for her it was far more widespread, another post showed that dozens of videos of hers were being mass flagged by the South Korean government, seemingly every video she had made regardless of its content was getting banned in that country:

Seeing that someone else had gotten this some kind of flagging on the same day was an interesting plot twist, it showed me that something more was going on here, the next piece of the puzzle after some more web searches was this article from South Korea’s Yonhap News agency, the article was a week old and noted that South Korea’s intelligence agency, the NIS, had called on the country’s internet regulator the KCSC to ban a Pro North Korea propaganda account on YouTube, it wasn’t Natalie’s channel and it of course wasn’t ours either, but something struck out at me, the article noted that the KCSC would decide on the ban a week later.

Well, here we are, a week later, and our documentary got banned, so did almost all of Natalie’s videos, the article doesn’t mention any other outlets as being targeted by the NIS but I find it highly unlikely that the South Korean regulator would go after us coincidentally just as they were following instructions from the NIS to ban certain North Korea related content they deemed politically incorrect. Was it possible that the NIS had put us on some kind of list? I thought so.

As absurd as it would seem for someone at a national intelligence agency to get so angry at our scrappy little documentary that they wanted it banished from their country’s internet, it would actually make a little more sense than some office worker at the KCSC randomly stumbling across our documentary after 2 years and deciding to get rid of it.

The article also mentioned that the NIS was concerned about North Korean psychological warfare and cyber attacks in the run up to South Korea’s elections in April, so I assumed it was possible that they were essentially trying to crack down on the ecosystem of North Korean and fellow traveller accounts to try and stop that, and our documentary had been swept up in this.

This becomes a more plausible theory when taking into account another detail, after the documentary released an account called Phoung DPRK Daily, another North Korean fellow traveller account, asked for permission to reupload the documentary to her channel, we agreed as long as we were credited, it appeared on her channel under the title “In Order to Lie”. Maybe while going through this web of North Korean sympathiser accounts on social media, the NIS had come across our work this way, and we essentially got flagged out of guilt by association.

Later, after more searching on social media, I found another account that had been flagged, again with the same explanation and on the same day as what we had gotten and what Natalie had gotten, this account was of the Turkish branch of the Korean Friendship Association, a kind of semi-official group of DPRK sympathisers (side note: another branch of the KFA had also taken an interest in our work before):

This case was also very bizarre, although the account was obviously posting pro-North Korea propaganda it wasn’t directed at the South Koreans, as the name implies it was directed towards Turks, with the videos consisting of Russian or Korean language videos with Turkish subtitles. Another strange thing about this was that the account wasn’t really a frequent uploader and most of its videos were fairly harmless, like North Korean music videos, it wasn’t some big propaganda broadcaster, so why it was seen as relevant enough that the South Korean authorities blocked it is a mystery.

But the fact that we had a third account also being flagged on the same day again convinced me that this was most likely not a coincidence, the NIS had been taking aim at North Korean propaganda and its spreaders and had already publicly called for one propaganda account to be shut down, it’s unlikely that they wouldn’t have been drawing up lists of other accounts or videos to be blacklisted as well.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened, we found an article from Reuters:

SEOUL, June 27 (Reuters) - Three YouTube channels seen as linked to North Korea’s state media have been taken down, a spokesperson for the U.S. video hosting site said on Tuesday, after South Korean regulators blocked them at the request of the country’s spy agency. The channels featured English-speaking young women, including a girl as young as 11, who claimed to offer an unfiltered look at every day life in North Korea as informal video bloggers, or “vloggers.”

An official at the Korea Communications Standards Commission confirmed media reports that it had blocked the sites in South Korea last week at the request of the National Intelligence Service on the grounds that the content was a “promotion” of the North Korean government and that it had a “positive bias” towards North Korea.

North Korea-linked Twitter accounts, including those of so-called “friendship associations” in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, have also been blocked in South Korea due to legal demands.

But from what we’ve seen, previously the NIS focused on accounts directly linked to North Korea or those with semi-official ties like the KFA, so it seems likely that now because of their growing paranoia about North Korean influence during election season they’ve decided to broaden the net.

Again, its obvious that our work isn’t Pro-DPRK propaganda and we don’t have a “positive bias” towards the North, but I’d wager that those responsible for the ban (whether that’s the KCSC or the NIS) didn’t even bother to watch the documentary before deciding it should be vaporised from their internet, as I mentioned before its most likely guilt by association, most likely they just saw some fellow travellers had shared the doc around and cracked down based on that.

End Thoughts

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Of course it’s important to point out that this is all speculation on my part, the notice we got from YouTube didn’t tell us what agency was ordering our video to be blocked or on what grounds, we just know that some part of the South Korean government was kicking up a fuss about our work, so maybe it really is a coincidence after all, because of the total lack of transparency around the ban we have no way of putting the pieces together, just guessing and going off of probability.

Either way it’s absolutely hilarious to me that we annoyed someone from a foreign government so much that they wanted to get rid of our video, the idea of it being someone in their intelligence agency is just even funnier, icing on the cake. I have to admit, I do consider it a badge of honour.

All I can say is, when we talked about South Korea in the documentary we were making the case that everything wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows over there, that the country isn’t exactly this rosy bastion of freedom, and well, they banned their own people from watching our documentary on a very flimsy basis, even when it’s obviously harmless to them, way to prove our point.

So if some half asleep intern from that country’s censor board or some diligent spy trying to see if we’re agents of Pyongyang happens to be reading this, here’s my message to your country: Lighten up, unclench your asscheeks, and don’t treat your people like babies.

Let your people decide for themselves what videos they want to watch and read, if they think we’re delusional propagandists coddling up to their enemies, they can judge that from experiencing our work for themselves; Or maybe, just maybe, they’ll find that we aren’t enemies of your country just because we have some harsh criticisms directed at it, we made those criticisms because we want things to get better, we want to see reporting on North Korea and we want it to be reliable, rather than a concoction of lazy stereotypes, unreliable narrators and unprovable or fake stories, in other words we’d like to see some actual journalism, that would benefit people in South Korea just as much as people anywhere else, we’re all better off when we’re better informed.

If anything, South Koreans have the most to gain from having a more accurate picture about the North, as clean or as dirty as that may end up being, because they’re your next door neighbours, whether you like it or not.

Changelog

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Edit 1 - 29/02/2024 - Added missing source link (Reuters article) and extra footnote (informed choices) and fixed alt text for one of the images

Edit 2 - 30/05/2024 - Hyperlinked Massi’s contributor page, moved “informed choices” footnote into the main article, fixed a broken link, minor correction (embargo on West Berlin, originally read “West Germany”)

Edit 3 - 08/07/2024 - Added a link to the democracy article to the segment talking about our views on political systems

Footnotes

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