North Korea’s Smartphones Are Pocket-Sized Orwellian Nightmares

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea offers a glimpse into the wild world of totalitarian control and extreme censorship measures the hermit kingdom has taken to keep its citizens in line.

Smuggled USB sticks and SD cards loaded with South Korean dramas and K-pop are still slipping across the border, but Kim Jong Un isn’t having any of it. In 2023, his government cranked the paranoia up to eleven by criminalizing South Korean phrases and even the accent. So much as speaking like someone from your neighboring country can get you thrown in prison, or worse. It’s like if we imprisoned anyone who pronounced “about” as “aboot.”

The state’s Orwellian control isn’t just on the streets or in conversations. They’ve managed to squeeze it down to the smartphones in people’s pockets. A North Korean smartphone smuggled out and examined by the BBC revealed that it’s basically a digital hall monitor with loyalty to the regime hardwired in.

Type “oppa” (a term of endearment from South Korea), and it autocorrects to “comrade.” Try to say “South Korea” and your phone spits back “puppet state.” You can’t just delete the autocorrect dictionary to make it all go away. Automatic, real-time censorship of a person’s hand-typed text is a permanent fixture.

It somehow gets even more invasive than that. The phone takes a screenshot every five minutes and sends it to the authorities. These files are hidden from users, which means your phone is literally spying on you and sending your receipts to Big Brother without even letting you peek at them.

According to Martyn Williams, a North Korea tech analyst, the country is using smartphones as tools of indoctrination, little handheld loyalty tests that double as surveillance machines. And troublingly, it’s working. North Korea is starting to win its internal information war, not by blocking foreign content entirely, but by making people too scared to engage with it.

24-year-old Kang Gyuri fled from North Korea in late 2023. She grew up thinking every other nation on earth was monitoring its citizens’ every move and suffocating their speech. It was only through smuggled media that she learned it was the other way around. “I thought other countries lived with this control,” she told the BBC. “But then I realised it was only in North Korea.”