‘I’m not a spy!’ is a refrain travel influencer Zoe Stephens routinely tells her 67,000 Instagram followers when they accuse her of promoting North Korean propaganda.
The 31-year-old tour guide, originally from Liverpool, purports to show her online audience a rare glimpse into the East Asian country ‘behind the politics and media noise’ - beyond nuclear weapons, secret police and mass starvation.
In Stephens’ posts, you’ll discover a ‘different’ North Korea, peppered with photos of her laughing alongside uniformed men, visiting the grandparents who run a folklore park in rural Kaesong, and running freely through the streets of Pyongyang during April's marathon.
She insists she’s not an undercover spy for Kim Jong Un’s regime, only a tour guide trying to ‘rehumanise the North Korea narrative’.
But in the wake of a new UN report which found that no other population in today’s world is under the same level of repression, the growth of positive content on social media about the secluded state is a cause for concern.
