KCNA Twitter Account Fake? Most likely [Update]

The Twitter account, who is supposed to be of the North Korean press agency KCNA, is most likely to be fake. The account, who actually caused a bit sensation and made journalist Mark MacKinnon post about the KCNA Twitter account like if it was real, is claimed to be made by David Sowka, a German journalist.

Other news sites like The Daily NK, Sina.com, Stnn.cc, Cnii.com.cn and iToday posted about it as well. Also the Chinese Wikipedia mentioned the fake Twitter account, as if it was real, according to David Sowka. Peter Walker of guardian.co.uk wrote about it, too.

David Sowka describes that he opened up the Twitter account and feed it with the help of news services like Tweetbots, Twitterfeed and Feedity. Those services generate new messages regularly on his twitter account, based on the published news of the official KCNA website, so that David Sowka does not have to actually work, to update his Twitter site.

The Twitter site had just a few subscribers/followers in the beginning but the numbers exploded when North Korea began the testing of atom bombs and rockets at the end of may 2009. For more details and how the hype also rose in North Korea, you can visit the article by David Sowka here. (translation by google)

At Least Andy Greenberg did some research and contacted Korean Central News Agency of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He received an email stating, that they do not have a twitter account. Another hint that the KCNA Twitter account is fake.

So, in conclusion, my believe that people need to be more cautious when it comes to believing the media, has been proven once again. In fact i think, education about the media system is the most important thing to achieve for those political activists, who want to break up the current hierarchy of elitist exploiters and their systems of lies and distorted reality.

I am not just talking about North Korea but also about those shiny capitalistic countries (USA etc.), the so called communistic China but basically all countries.  Because, besides dilettantism, like in the aforementioned case and mindless articles by camp followers, there is of course the willingly and elaborated political influence by a lot of media corporations, by bending the truth, leaving out facts, telling flat out lies and other techniques. But to go into detail I would need to write another (huge) blog entry.

Update: The account has been suspended “due to strange activity”. Hehe.

Thanks for reading

Filtertyp (Polignostix.com)