A spokesperson for the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers Party of North Korea, Jon Pyong-ho explains;
‘Fat kitten falling off piano… 3 million likes, some cancer kid with an obviously photo-shopped sign asking for prayers…5 million ‘Amens’, some story about a new complicated government policy that will reduce personal freedoms…7 likes! Brilliant, just the kind of priorities we want people to have.
Also, the majority on Facebook copies everyone else, they only like things because others like things. Few think for themselves. That is exactly the kind of society we have been trying to create. I was particularly impressed with selective copycat moral outrage last year. When I have seen everyone using the French flag and that gay rainbow thing to recycle old profile pics with an attractive color filter…well I almost peed my pants I laughed so much. Well done Facebook for that little social experiment. You certainly proved that people can so easily be trained to become ‘sheeple’.
On Facebook everyone pretends to be so happy all the time with a perfect life, always smiling, looking their best, bragging about where they have been, and what they have eaten. You people make some of our North Korean perfect life propaganda look lame.
I think the best thing about social media from our government’s perspective is that it not only brings out the self-corralling human nature of people towards bland sameness, but it also allows the creation of the big bad wolf, stoking up irrational hysteria quickly and without letting facts get in the way. There is no better way to keep sheep together than to keep them afraid. When any dissenting voices, black sheep, question the logic or evidence behind the fear, you simply don’t like their post, or you shut them up by calling them unpatriotic or unfriend them for being smart arses.
Someone once said that conformity is the opposite of heroism, not cowardice. They were right. Look at history, Nazi Germany etc., cowardice never killed millions of people, conformity did. And as the great Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbals said about how to promote conformity, ‘Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will’.
As a result of these new understandings on the power of social media to promote conformity, the Propaganda and Agitation Department have reversed its view and will now allow full access to our citizens. The best thing about social media is that people’s thoughts and behaviour are now largely policed by you, not the government. To update Chairman Mao’s famous slogan we could now say, ‘Facebook – promoting social conformity of the people, by the people’.
