North Korea’s obsession with total control has once again produced revelations that are as horrifying as they are revealing. Human rights researchers disclosed in early February that North Korean authorities have executed teenagers for watching the South Korean television series Squid Game and listening to K-pop, acts the regime treats not as cultural consumption but as ideological crimes.
Amnesty International cited testimony from a defector with family ties in Yanggang Province who said people, including schoolchildren, were executed specifically for watching the globally popular survival drama.
The account fits a broader pattern the organization has documented for years: the regime’s ruthless effort to seal its population off from outside information, particularly from South Korea, whose culture offers an inconvenient contrast to the North’s enforced misery.
Other testimonies gathered by Amnesty describe forced labor sentences, public shaming, and imprisonment for consuming South Korean media elsewhere in the country. The punishments, however, are not applied equally. Defectors consistently report that wealth and political connections determine outcomes as much as the offense itself. Those with money can sometimes escape with warnings or bribes, while those without face the full weight of the system.
Kim Joonsik, now 28, told Amnesty he was caught watching South Korean dramas three times before leaving North Korea in 2019. He avoided legal punishment, he said, because his family had connections.
That protection was not extended to everyone. According to Kim, three of his sisters’ high school friends were sentenced to multi-year terms in labor camps in the late 2010s for the same behavior. Their crime was not curiosity, but poverty.
Amnesty officials describe this as repression layered with corruption, a system that criminalizes access to information while allowing officials to profit from fear. The regime’s terror is not just about enforcing loyalty, but about preventing comparison.
Exposure to South Korean entertainment undermines the state’s propaganda by showing a Korean society that is prosperous, creative, and free.
Several defectors also described being forced to witness public executions while still in school. These spectacles were not hidden; they were compulsory. Kim Eunju, now 40, said students were taken to executions as teenagers and shown exactly what happened to those caught watching or distributing South Korean media. The message was explicit and deliberate: curiosity leads to death.
