[LINK] "North Korea's Twitter Identity Crisis"

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks are owed to one of my Facebook friends for this.

Since early April, a Twitter account under the handle @KCNA_DPRK, claiming to be based in Pyongyang, has been twittering headlines of the official news releases published by the Korean Central News Agency, the government-run news outlet of the dictatorial Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Those 140-character news flashes have ranged from announcements of the recent underground nuclear explosions that are currently testing the rogue nation's relations with the West, to accusations of Japanese war crimes, to the invention of a new type of North Korean toothpaste with "high medical properties." (In addition to preventing cavities, it also aids in digestion and can be used to treat insect bites, eczema and colds.)

The headlines, it seems, are real--or at least as real as any that emerge from North Korea's reality distortion field. The twitterer, on the other hand, is an impostor.

In response to an e-mail from Forbes asking about its new presence on Twitter, a KCNA spokesperson replied: "We do not permit to appear KCNA on Twitter at all," and said that the agency is currently inquiring with Twitter's management regarding its tweet-alike. Twitter staff didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a twitter conversation with Forbes, the author of the KCNA twitter feed admitted that he or she was a writer and Web master for the German-language parody site Stupidedia, based in Austria. "KCNA has unintentionally funny articles, and I thought it would be funny if an antiquated regime like North Korea had a Twitter account," wrote the faux-Communist, who didn't respond to requests for his or her name. The fake KCNA account, which has gained more than 1,000 followers, was set up using the Twitterfeed RSS service to automatically syndicate every newsflash from the real DPRK news agency.

Am I alone in wondering if someone might be disappeared?