A shocking new report detailed by Sky News reveals that North Korea may be executing schoolchildren and other citizens for watching the South Korean Netflix hit Squid Game amid a broader crackdown on foreign media consumption, according to testimony gathered by human rights organization Amnesty International.
The report, built on 25 in-depth interviews with North Korean defectors, highlights a climate of fear inside the reclusive state where consuming South Korean television shows, dramas, and pop music is treated as a serious ideological crime — punishable by severe penalties, including death, forced labor, or public humiliation.
Defectors who fled North Korea between 2019 and 2020 described brutal punishments meted out under the regime of Kim Jong Un. One interviewee recounted hearing from another escapee — with family ties inside North Korea — that people, including high school students in Yanggang Province near the Chinese border, were executed for watching Squid Game.
Another execution tied to the show was documented in 2021 by Radio Free Asia, where an individual was executed for distributing copies of Squid Game in North Hamgyong Province — underscoring a pattern of severe enforcement across regions.
North Korea’s 2020 Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act brands South Korean media as “rotten ideology that paralyzes the people’s revolutionary sense.” Under the law, watching or possessing banned content can lead to five to 15 years of forced labor, with harsher sentences — including death — for distribution or organizing viewings.
Amnesty International’s testimonies suggest that the harshest punishments tend to fall on the less affluent, while those with money or connections sometimes escape the worst consequences through bribes or influence.
Some escapees also described how schoolchildren were forced to attend public executions as a form of “ideological education” — a tactic reportedly used to instill fear and deter others from consuming foreign media.
One defector, Kim Eunju, recalled that students in middle school were taken to witness executions, told repeatedly that such punishments would be their fate if they watched or shared South Korean media.
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