North Korea has been killing its own schoolchildren for watching television shows, according to a new Amnesty International report that details the Kim Jong Un regime's brutal enforcement of a law criminalizing access to South Korean entertainment.
The report, based on 25 in-depth interviews conducted in 2025 with North Koreans who fled the country between 2012 and 2020, describes public killings, years-long labor camp sentences, and forced public humiliations imposed on teenagers and middle school students for consuming foreign media — including Netflix's "Squid Game" — under the regime's 2020 Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act.
According to the New York Post, the findings have drawn renewed international attention to human rights conditions inside North Korea. UN investigators, South Korean officials, Radio Free Asia, and CNN have all separately documented similar patterns of state violence tied to foreign media consumption in the isolated nation.
Kim Jong Un's regime enacted the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act in 2020, branding South Korean media as "rotten ideology that paralyses the people's revolutionary sense." The law mandates five to 15 years of forced labor for watching or possessing South Korean content.
Harsher penalties, including death, apply to those who distribute content or organize group viewings. Radio Free Asia separately documented a person killed by the state for distributing "Squid Game" in North Hamgyong Province in 2021.
An unnamed interviewee told Amnesty that people, including high school students, were killed by authorities for watching the show in Yanggang Province near the Chinese border. Amnesty wrote, "Taken together, these reports from different provinces suggest multiple executions related to the shows."
Among the most troubling findings is that punishment under the regime appears to depend heavily on a family's financial resources. Amnesty stated that poorer families face significantly harsher penalties for identical offenses.
"People are caught for the same act, but punishment depends entirely on money," said Choi Suvin, 39, who fled North Korea in 2019. "People without money sell their houses to gather $5,000 or $10,000 to pay to get out of the re-education camps."
That reality — a communist regime where survival is purchased with cash — ought to give every self-described socialist in the Western world a moment of serious reflection. The ideology that promises equality delivers, in practice, a system where the poor are killed and the connected walk free.
Kim Joonsik, 28, told Amnesty he was caught watching South Korean dramas three times before leaving in 2019, but avoided punishment through family connections. "Usually when high school students are caught, if their family has money, they just get warnings," he said. "I didn't receive legal punishment because we had connections." Three of his sister's high school friends were not as fortunate, receiving years-long labor camp sentences in the late 2010s because their families could not afford bribes.
Kim Eunju, 40, described being compelled as a teenager to witness state killings carried out as public spectacles. "When we were 16, 17, in middle school, they took us to executions and showed us everything," Kim Eunju said. "People were executed for watching or distributing South Korean media. It's ideological education: if you watch, this happens to you too." A specialized police unit known as the "109 Group" conducts warrantless home raids and street searches for foreign media, according to 15 of the 25 interviewees. Despite the danger, smuggled USB drives from China remain a primary channel for accessing banned content inside the country.
The Amnesty findings align with broader international reporting. In early 2024, CNN broadcast footage showing two North Korean teenagers sentenced to years of hard labor for watching and distributing South Korean dramas. A UN human rights report released in 2025 warned that the regime has increasingly relied on public killings to instill fear over offenses tied to foreign information.
Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International's deputy regional director, put the stakes plainly: "These testimonies show how North Korea is enforcing dystopian laws that mean watching a South Korean TV show can cost you your life — unless you can afford to pay."
Americans who enjoy the freedom to stream any show on any device at any hour would do well to consider what that liberty actually means. In North Korea, a teenager pressing play on a smuggled USB drive risks a death sentence. That is the endgame of total state control — and a sobering reminder of why free societies must never take the rights they possess for granted.