IT HAS NO INTERNET. Its people use only a censored intranet (the ‘Kwangmyong’) where all content has already been vetted and deemed fit for public consumption. Its official news agency’s website is hosted in Japan. Even its official state website looks like it might have been designed in an ECDL class… in Wordpad.

Its priorities are so muddled that despite having nuclear arms, it even tries to pay off its national debts in ginseng.

Yet now North Korea has moved online in an attempt to regain ground in its propaganda war with South Korea and its ‘imperialist’ enemy from the United States: it has opened a Twitter account.

The account – @uriminzok, meaning ‘our people’, and giving its location as Pyonyang – went online last week and has accrued almost 9,000 followers, despite all of its tweets being in Korean – intended, it would appear, for eyes in the South.

It’s associated website is that of the national Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea – another nod to its intended audience.

The account has met other eyes, though, including those of Washington’s Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Philip J Crowley – who welcomed the country to the social media network, though not without referring to it as the “Hermit Kingdom“.

Perhaps frustratingly for Pyongyang, however, the account – as well as its accompanying website, and its associated YouTube channel – has been blocked in South Korea, which deemed the accounts to have “illegal information“.

North Korea, unusually, hosts all of its online materials at .com or other non-native internet domains – there are just a handful of sites using addresses at its .kp domain, though the number is slowly growing.

Its president, Kim Jong-il, is said to love “surfing the net” and has described himself as an “internet expert”.