0.03% of North Korea’s population has access to Web

PanARMENIAN.Net - North Korea has a grand total of 7,200 Web users according to a new survey on global internet use, The Next Web says.

According to a report published by We Are Social, a marketing agency, the country lead by Kim Jong Un only allows 0.03 percent of the population to access the Web.

As a direct comparison, Iceland has 98 percent of its population using the Web.

That’s not to say that North Korean citizens aren’t ‘online’. The state has made its own internal version – think AOL in the nineties, but worse – called Kwangmyong, which translates literally to mean ‘bright’, TNW says.

This version of the Web isn’t connected to the wider internet, meaning any content from the outside world that does get in is vetted by government officials and manually uploaded.

A search engine called Our Country helps users navigate round the estimated 5,500 websites, which mainly consist of universities, government offices, libraries and state-run corporations.

They do however, have their own version of Facebook – although the users are only allowed to post birthday messages.

For the rest of the country’s 24.9 million people not on the worldwide Web, just think of all the memes they’ve missed out on over the years, TNW says.