‘I’m not a spy!’ is a refrain travel influencer Zoe Stephens routinely tells her 67,000 Instagram followers when they accuse her of promoting North Korean propaganda.
The 31-year-old tour guide, originally from Liverpool, purports to show her online audience a rare glimpse into the East Asian country ‘behind the politics and media noise’ – beyond nuclear weapons, secret police and mass starvation.
In Stephens’ posts, you’ll discover a ‘different’ North Korea, peppered with photos of her laughing alongside uniformed men, visiting the grandparents who run a folklore park in rural Kaesong, and running freely through the streets of Pyongyang during April’s marathon.
She insists she’s not an undercover spy for Kim Jong Un’s regime, only a tour guide trying to ‘rehumanise the North Korea narrative’.
But in the wake of a new UN report which found that no other population in today’s world is under the same level of repression, the growth of positive content on social media about the secluded state is a cause for concern.
The UN’s sweeping review found that the government had introduced tougher surveillance on civilians over the past decade, while punishments had become harsher – including the introduction of the death penalty for watching or sharing foreign TV dramas.
But the reality of public executions, forced labour and systematic electronic surveillance is often omitted from the picture-perfect shots we see on social media.
Stephens isn’t the only digital personality pushing such content; increasingly, more and more Instagrammers, YouTubers and TikTokers are eager to challenge the West’s critical view of the hermit kingdom and offer a more glowing report of North Korean society.
Zoe Stephens posing alongside a North Korean official in uniform
The travel influencer often films herself taste-testing local drinks and food
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arriving to attend a national flag-raising and oath-taking ceremony at the Mansudae Assembly Hall to mark the 77th anniversary of the country’s founding in Pyongyang, North Korea, September 9, 2025
On the ‘Zoe Discovers’ Instagram feed, you’ll see the tour guide taste-tasting local food and drink, doing traditional dance with locals on the birthday of Kim Jong Il, and enjoying the view from the 30th floor at Pyongyang’s glitzy Sosan Hotel.
She works as a marketing manager and group leader at Koryo Tours, a tour company founded in China in 1993 by Brits Nick Bonner and Josh Green, and has visited the world’s most secretive nation more than 30 times.
North Korea sealed itself off to tourism at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. In February, the country finally let Western visitors back in – but only for a few weeks, before the borders closed again in March.
Though recently, Western tourists found a way back across the border. In April, North Korea held the Pyongyang International Marathon for the first time in six years, welcoming some 200 foreign runners – including several social media influencers.
Content creators took that opportunity to film themselves running apparently freely around Pyongyang, in an attempt to bust stereotypes about the secret police lining every secret corner.
‘All the Koreans are smiling and waving, heading to work,’ says Harry Jaggard, a YouTuber with 2.58 million subscribers, as he films himself running the marathon and high-fiving spectators.
‘Pyongyang was nothing like I expected. The city was clean, grand and surprisingly peaceful,’ he says, adding how warm and friendly the tour guides were.
‘Ever wondered why governments want us to hate each other,’ he wrote in the caption to a video featuring jubilant interactions of him hugging smiling locals – the implication being that the country has been needlessly demonised by the West.
George Devedlaka, or ‘GeorgeGoesFar’, is another YouTuber who visited the regime for the marathon and expressed a positive sentiment online about the pariah state.
In answer to a question from one of his followers asking if people seemed happy, he said: ‘I’m not beating the propaganda allegations with this one but on the whole… yes.
‘We got a surface level view of course but people would go out to bars and have a normal enough existence. They’d be cheery when we spoke to them.’
In one TikTok with 2.8 million views, he asked a North Korean barber to give him a haircut like Kim, after showing the man a photo of the 41-year-old supreme leader.
TikToker Anna Pelova, who was locked out of the UK during the pandemic and is now dedicated to visiting every country (she’s done 105 so far), took to social media to show off all of the food she was eating during her visit to the totalitarian state.
‘Another day in Pyongyang, another 10-course meal. I haven’t been this over fed in a long time,’ she wrote.
‘Your information about North Korea and the famine from the 90s is probably outdated. In 2025, shops are well stocked, restaurants are quite pleasant, and there are plenty of imported products.’
But North Korea has faced critical food shortages in recent years, with around 45 percent of the country believed to be undernourished between 2020 and 2022, according to the UN’s ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report’, published in 2023.
TikToker Anna Pelova visited North Korea in April and told her followers about the 10-course meals she ate in the capital
Content creator ‘George Goes Far’ asked a North Korean barber to give him a haircut like Kim Jong Un
YouTuber Harry Juggard smiles next to a crowd of North Korean spectators at the Pyongyang International Marathon
When commenters accuse her of posting footage that romanticises the dictatorship, Stephens will often accuse her followers of being narcissistic. ‘Don’t know who needs to hear this but – you’re not that important that someone would build an entire “fake” city just to please you,’ she wrote under one post.
‘I believe the majority of those condemning me on social media, citing the suffering of the North Korean people as the primary issue in my content, have never once themselves contributed to any North Korea-related humanitarian cause,’ she told the Daily Mail.
But for North Korean defectors like 31-year-old YouTuber Charles Ryu Woo, content like Stephens’ is perpetuating the very propaganda Kim uses to convince the population that they aren’t oppressed.
‘She’s right, the tourists going in aren’t special. But do you know who is special? The 27 million North Korean people – because the moment they realise they’re treated terribly, they’re going to overthrow the regime,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘What the North Korean regime is doing isn’t to trick foreigners, it’s to show the population how great Kim Jong Un is. That’s the kind of propaganda I saw growing up: how North Korea is building a dam to make power, and how the leader is working tirelessly to build apartments, schools and hospitals to make our lives better.’
Ryu grew up by candlelight without electricity in a house built on plank wood and mud in the mountainous Changjin County, in the South Hamgyong Province. When he was 11, his mother died of starvation.
He risked his life by escaping North Korea to China twice, once aged 14, and again two years later after he was deported back by Chinese authorities when a neighbour reported his illegal presence.
As punishment, Ryu was put into a political labour camp for nine months where he was fed just a handful of corn normally used to feed pigs and cows per day.
For him, the social media content posted by Western influencers is infuriating because it’s not representative of the average North Korean experience.
North Korean defector Charles Woo Ryu makes YouTube videos about how he escaped the regime after growing up in poverty, being tormented by the secret police and living fear of public executions
The vast majority of North Koreans don’t even have access to the internet, and the privileged few who are allowed smartphones can only use a state-run, censored intranet, called the kwangmyong – which only allows access to government-sanctioned websites and email networks.
Secondly, the influencers don’t always make it clear that life in Pyongyang – where around three million North Koreans live – is like a fairytale compared to the rest of the country, where most are extremely poor and access to basics like clean water, sewage systems, fridges and washing machines is scarce.
‘Pyongyang is like a completely different country in North Korea. You don’t get to go to Pyongyang as a normal citizen,’ he says.
‘Even if you have top security clearance as an elite, if you want to go to Pyongyang you have to get a car wash before you enter, because they don’t want to show dirty cars to the foreigners.
‘Whenever I talk about North Korea and Pyongyang, I try to make that distinction, because we don’t visit: we don’t get to go there, we don’t get to live there – it’s purely for the top of society.’
For Ryu, his frustration with a lot of the influencers is that they don’t realise just how curated and choreographed mass spectacles such as the Pyongyang Marathon really are.
‘These kinds of events are strategically planned months and years in advance to show foreigners how great North Korea is,’ he says.
In footage shot at the marathon in the Kim Il Sung Stadium, he noticed something suspicious about the hundreds of North Koreans in the stands, clapping hysterically in support of the runners.
He recalled how growing up in the impoverished Changjin County, his peers in school would be scouted to attend huge annual ceremonies of national importance in the capital, such as the Arirang Mass Games.
Beforehand, everyone in his class would practise clapping, singing and cheering in rigid preparation for the public spectacle.
In his opinion, the excessively happy crowds seen in the stadium are curated – there to manufacture the image of a unified society in front of the cameras.
Zoe Stephens poses alongside more North Korean men in uniform
North Korean farmers plant rice seedlings in a field at the Sambong Cooperative Farm, South Pyongan Province
Now based in California, Ryu uses his YouTube channel to educate his 137 thousand subscribers about the truth behind social media’s gloss on the country he risked everything to flee.
He told the Daily Mail he’d rather influencers not visit North Korea for three reasons: one, because he says they’ll only get to see what the government lets them; second, because they’re directly or indirectly funding the regime; and thirdly, because ‘if they come out alive’, the instinct is to make some kind of content and tell the world: ‘North Korea seems fine!’
‘It makes me furious, and makes me feel like the deaths of so many children in North Korea due to starvation and malnutrition were all in vain,’ he says.
It’s not just travel influencers who are rewriting the narrative surrounding North Korea; the DPRK is gaining a following among anti-U.S. leftist TikTokers who are romanticising its communist history.
Edward Liger, who runs the account ‘Midwestern Marx’, posted a TikTok raving about the announcement of a 10,000 apartment development in Pyongyang, comparing Kim’s regime favourably to the capitalist U.S.
‘They look pretty nice. Guess how much money the people of Pyongyang are going to be paying in rent in order to live here? A sum total of zero dollars because they don’t have landlords in the DPRK,’ he says.
But the idea of free, universal housing in North Korea is just another myth.
A 2021 study by South Korea’s Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology suggested that the country only has enough homes to accommodate 70 percent to 80 percent of its households.
A limited supply of free housing does exist, but in the vast majority of cases it’s reserved for celebrities and high-ranking officials, according to South Korean outlet NK News.
Outside of the moneyed capital, many houses are derelict and lack consistent access to electricity.
North Korean propaganda village ‘Gijungdong’ is seen from an South Korea’s observation post
Domestic tourists visit the beach at Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Area in Wonsan, North Korea’s Kangwon Province, on July 1, 2025
It was originally planned to boost tourism and has been described by state media as a ‘national treasure-level city’
Traveling abroad or moving from one province to another without prior consent remains illegal in Kim’s regime and anyone caught violating the law is risking their life.
In August 2020, the government established ‘border buffer zones’ on the border with China and Russia, with guards ordered to ‘unconditionally shoot’ anyone entering without permission, according to Human Rights Watch.
But social media’s glamorisation of the country arrives at a time when the regime is marketing itself as the next best luxury tourist hotspot – with the recent opening of the glitzy seaside retreat Wonsan Kalma that accommodates up to 20,000 visitors.
So far, only Russian tourists have been allowed to visit the Benidorm-style resort, fit with 54 hotels, shopping malls and five kilometres of beach, but Kim has said he wants to revive international tourism and borders might re-open in the future.
Restrictions at the east coast ‘paradise’ still apply. Tour guides in the beach-side resort have already been advised to avoid using certain phrases that are popular in the West when speaking to foreign visitors, including the word ‘hamburger’ which is banned.
The guides, who are enrolled in a rigorous state-run training programme, are instead being instructed to say dajin-gogi gyeopppang (double bread with ground beef) for hamburger and eseukimo (eskimo) for ice cream. Meanwhile karaoke machines should be called ‘on-screen accompaniment machines’.
Of course, such signs of everyday repression are unlikely to fit into happy-go-lucky travel vlogs, depicting the outcast country as an up-and-coming holiday destination for all the family.
Responding to the Daily Mail’s request for comment, Zoe Stephens said it was not her intent to promote propaganda for the regime, but to show an ‘informed and fuller picture of the country’.
‘I aim to promote tourism to North Korea because I believe that exchange has value both inside and outside of the country, and hope to show the human interactions I experience in North Korea.
‘I make it known that I self-censor my content and I don’t concern myself with politics because this is already covered extensively in the mass media,’ she added.
When asked whether her focus on the more ‘positive’ aspects of the country glosses over the humanitarian struggle, she disagreed.
‘On the contrary, I hope to rehumanise the North Korean narrative exactly with the intent of contributing positively to the humanitarian cause. Why would people donate to a country with a population so dehumanised in the media?’
George Devedlaka said his goal was not to spread propaganda with his content, but to provide an ‘objective and ultimately humanising’ view of what he saw on his trip to North Korea.
‘I tend to believe that the people of any country deserve to have open minded visitors so that they can share their stories exactly as they see them, free of any foreign bias we may have,’ he added.
When asked whether he felt his promotion of tourism funded the regime, he said: ‘What’s new? My money has funded many regimes I don’t agree with. At least in this case I could directly see my money supporting my tour guide, a young mother who had their livelihood taken away due to the tourism shutdown.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .