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If you are interested in hearing what North Korea has to tell the world you can find their tweets under the account @uriminzok. However tweets about what the DPRK’s dictator got up to on the weekend will most likely be quite lacking, with the service instead being used to espouse anti-U.S./R.O.K rhetoric and propaganda. Reportedly the account already has in excess of 4,500 followers.

However it’s also highly unlikely any of the followers are actually subjects of the Dear Leader as a mere fraction of the nation’s 23 million citizens have access to the internet in what is one of the most reclusive and secretive states on the planet. What’s more, with posts being written in non Romanized Hangeul it’s debatable how far the North’s recent propaganda messages will penetrate.

Hazel Smith, an expert on North Korea at Cranfield University in the U.K., feels that the North are well versed in social networking sites. “The North Koreans are technologically literate and they have people who can use modern social networking sites. But the problem for them is the content,” she said.

However it is thought that in the near future the DPRK could start using social media to promote English language propaganda, in order to denounce the actions of “war mongerers” such as their southern neighbors. Professor Sung-Yoon Lee, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston, stated that the anti-U.S. rhetoric they have so far posted is nothing original, yet this could change. “The North Koreans already produce propaganda material in English through the Korean Central News Agency. It will just take them a little more time and effort,” he said.

The Dear Leader’s regime has already been stockpiling a particularly potent supply of propaganda videos via their YouTube account, which launched in July and now hosts over 80 videos. The agency responsible for both the videos and the tweets is a ministry of the ruling communist party. Gilles Lordet, chief editor of Reporters Without Borders in Paris, said this was true of all media in North Korea. “There is absolutely no press freedom in North Korea. There is only the government, the voice of the regime,” he said.

So how serious are the DPRK about their latest foray into social networking? Will we soon see the regime setting up fan pages for Kim Jong-il and press ganging workers into ‘liking’ his profile on Facebook or else seeing how many friends they can garner on MySpace so they can then brag about it to their allies?

Yet maybe the hermit nation has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon a little too late. After all, Twitter has been around since 2006 and just about everyone and their dog has signed up by this point, so it’s hardly as if they are spelunking virgin territory. Also rather than raising the profile and egoism of the DPRK and its leader maybe forays into social networking could in fact cut them quite literally down to size.

At the end of the day no self respecting, iron willed dictator wants to lose a popularity war to a C-list celebrity who spends close to every waking hour working the Twitter machine. Therefore maybe this will soon be another aborted policy of the North - much like the half forgotten slogan of what was hoped to be an agricultural revolution; “Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!” Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction.