A Christchurch man has discovered that state news outlets in North Korea have erased thousands of articles from its website.
Feinstein Doak director Frank Feinstein tracks North Korea's online media for NK News, a website in the United States.
He discovered about 35,000 articles have disappeared from the website of the official KCNA, as well as 65,000 articles in Spanish, English, Chinese and Japanese.
At present, the digital record of state-approved news on the site reaches back only to October 2013.
Mr Feinstein says the move appears intended to expunge a recently executed politician, Jang Song-thaek, from the official record.
"From then I started paying close attention to the North Korean websites, and from then on I have observed wholesale re-writing. It is fascinating because we can see how they do it, what their thought processes are, and it's somethign straight out of 1984."
