The Subtle Way The North Korean Internet Inflates The Importance Of North Korean Leaders

North Korea is a strange place, with a cult of personality around young leader Kim Jong-un and his father and grandfather (Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung) that is said to have put the country dangerously in the hole.

This strange cult of personality is well at work in North Korea's closed internet system. Over the weekend the BBC published an article from technology correspondent Dave Lee that took a long look at the hermit state's online world.

His conclusion? It's "strange".

Take, for example, the subtle way Kim Jong-un and his family are revered using HTML:

There's a curious quirk on every official North Korean website. A piece of programming that must be included in each page's code.

Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out.

To see this practice for yourself, head over to North Korean new agency KCNA's English-language website. It's not just the younger Kim who gets this treatment, of course, as this article on Kim Jong-il demonstrates:

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