A SOUTH KOREAN man has been given a suspended sentence after being found guilty of retweeting propagandist messages posted on Twitter by North Korea’s official news agency.

The man, 55, was given a two-year sentence for habitually retweeting messages posted on the @uriminzok account – which tweets links to stories from the Uriminzokkiri (‘Our Own Nationals’) agency, considered an official State mouthpiece.

The man – identified only by his surname, Cho – was convicted by a court in Seoul of breaching the country’s new laws on national security, introduced in attempts to stop the spread of what is deemed unsafe material from north of the border.

Cho had apparently retweeted the messages to his 3,000-or-so followers from August, when the @uriminzok account was created, until December when he was apprehended.

AFP reported how the court ruled his actions could have posted a threat “to South Korea’s national interest”, rejecting defences that Cho was merely passing on news about the country’s northern neighbour.

It was in December that South Korean officials had warned that any citizen who was caught interacting with North Korea, or anybody based there, over the Twitter service would be prosecuted.

The ‘retweet’ function was specifically specifically named as one of the acts forbidden by the country’s new policies.

Those policies were prompted by the ongoing dispute between the two Korean nations over the November shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, in which four people were killed.

Aside from a Twitter account, Uriminzokkiri also set up a YouTube account where it posts videos of state news bulletins like this: