There is just a lot of bs being spread about NK. Westerners, for example, genuindely believed all koreans had to get a haircut that is approved by the government.

I'm not even saying this country is not paranoid, but its nearly not as bad as everyone is imaging, and frankly, considering what Americans have inflicted unto the korean people, its fairly understandable.

Why do you think that is the 'most plausible explanation'? NK meets the simple test for evil dictatorships: do they need to use fences to stop citizens from leaving? Yes, NK does exactly that.

Look at the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinist oppression in the 1930s. Having the wrong book (not even necessarily a Western book but even a Soviet book that is no longer in good graces) could be a trip to the Gulag which for many was a death sentence.

A lot of it was driven by quotas that the police had to meet.

I wonder why NK doesn't pay "fake" defectors to create counter-propaganda. Well, that's a silly joke. Yet, the fact is that regime has implemented new laws to strictly regulate citizens' access to SK/Western TV shows. Nor does it make any effort to present its own narrative to the world by allowing people to freely share some TikTok clips showing them enjoying domestic content about their supreme commander over shitty foreign Netflix videos. Why? Because no way it is possible.

It certainly serves a purpose to have a reason, to make people fearful.

Ok, so let me get this straight.

Some foreigner came into their country and tried to 'illuminate' the 'unwashed' masses via tearing down propaganda and was promptly thrown into some hellhole of a jail.

Seems to me like a normal thing to have happened. By the standards of the Global North, that is.

Doesn't seem meaningfully different from today's USA.

hahaha. Good point. But seriously, a quick browse of the comments below is full of absurdities: Claims that the BBC is a shill of imperialism (It may very well be to an extent, but that doesn't mean it isn't laying out deep reporting with plenty of real information about well documented barbarities by the Kim regime), claims that the majority of NK defectors are mainly liars (thousands of them, all coordinating their lies across multiple decades well enough to mostly match in their details, really?) and what-aboutist nonsense implying that no country with its own border controls or occasional attempts to stifle free expression is much different from what NK does; Degrees of difference do exist, and can eventually mount enough until a difference becomes fundamentally qualitative. North Korea is well beyond the pale for mounting degrees of repression.

Then there's the idea that it's just too unbelievable to conceive that the regime would execute people simply for watching foreign movies. The Stalin regime executed or GULAG-starved many hundreds of thousands for the 1930s versions of the same thing, or for having any contact and even just suspected contact with foreigners. The Nazi regime killed millions simply for existing under a certain invented category of threat, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge would mass execute hundreds of thousands for being "bourgeoisie" because they.... had university educations, or maybe wore glasses, or spoke a second language (yes, the condemnations were really that murderously banal and never mind that many Khmer leaders themselves could tick off these same classifications for their own lives). I see nothing at all unbelievable about a youthful dictator in a closed country protected by its nuclear arsenal further absolutizing his own power by showing ever more of his already well-demonstrated indifference to human life whenever it suits him.