North Koreans Executed for Watching BTS and "Squid Game"

The Pyongyang regime has intensified its "ideological war" against foreign culture. According to Amnesty International, schoolchildren in North Korea are being publicly executed or sent to labor camps for watching the series "Squid Game" or listening to songs by the K-pop group BTS.

Amnesty International (a global human rights organization) published a special report in 2025 based on 25 in-depth interviews with North Korean defectors. Witnesses describe the situation in the country as reaching a "dystopian" level.
The Pyongyang regime is conducting an extremely brutal crackdown on foreign culture. In particular, watching globally popular series such as "Squid Game," "Crash Landing on You," and "Descendants of the Sun" is considered a serious crime, and individuals may pay with their lives for doing so.

The country's punitive system is riddled with social inequality and corruption. According to witnesses, children from wealthy and influential families can avoid punishment by paying large bribes or using high-level connections if they are caught. For instance, officials may demand between $5,000 and $10,000 to release someone from a re-education camp. In contrast, children from poor families without such means are sentenced to long prison terms or face public execution.
Specifically, there are documented cases from 2021 where high school students were executed for distributing the "Squid Game" series.

This brutality is not limited to TV shows; authorities have also placed young people who listen to K-pop music, including BTS, under strict surveillance. A law enacted in 2020 defines foreign content as a "rotten ideology that paralyzes the people's revolutionary spirit," prescribing up to 15 years of forced labor for possession. To instill fear from a young age, children are forced to attend the public executions of their peers as part of their "ideological education."

As a result, a specialized unit known as "Group 109" was established. They have the right to conduct warrantless searches of homes and inspect citizens' mobile phones. Despite these risks, North Korean citizens continue to watch foreign content in secret via USB flash drives smuggled from China.

Amnesty International has called on the North Korean government to stop the gross violations of international law and human freedom. The organization believes that this fear of information is a tool used to keep the population in an "ideological cage."

"This is an arbitrary system built on fear and corruption that suffocates the human mind. It must be dismantled immediately," the report stated.