Posts misrepresent image of travel visa as North Korean ID card of South Korean lawmaker
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on July 3, 2023 at 11:07
- Updated on July 3, 2023 at 11:43
- 3 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
"People of our country, look at this photo which shows a North Korean communist identity card issued to Kim Dae-jung's son," reads the Korean-language claim shared here on Facebook on June 27, 2023.
The accompanying image appears to show a messaging service interface sharing a document issued by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea. The document includes a photo of South Korean lawmaker Kim Hong-gul, his date of birth and gender (archived link).
The next Korean-language text message reads: "Kim Dae-jung's son Kim Hong-gul has been caught red-handed."
Kim Hong-gul is the youngest son of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, whose policy of reconciliation with the North has seen him and his family members become occasional targets of misinformation related to North Korea (archived link).
Images of the same document were shared alongside similar false claims on Facebook here, here and here.
AFP found the image in fact shows a North Korean travel visa and the lawmaker's office confirmed it was not an identity card.
North Korean travel visa
A Google reverse image search found a matching photo of the document published on Kim's official Facebook page on July 16, 2018, in a post that reads: "I am departing for Pyongyang soon" (archived link).
The document clearly states it is a North Korean travel visa issued for a duration of four days and Kim's nationality is labelled as South Korea.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the image shared with the false claim (left) and the original photo published on Kim's Facebook page in July 2018 (right):
Kim's office told AFP the claim was "ridiculously false" and confirmed the photo being shared was of a travel visa to North Korea.
They also confirmed he was of South Korean nationality as clearly marked in the entry.
"The photo is a visa which Representative Kim was officially issued in order to visit North Korea in July 2018 on behalf of the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation to discuss the project to return the [forced labourer] remains," Choi Woong-sik, a spokesperson for Kim's office, told AFP on June 27.
On July 16, 2018, Kim shared a report from South Korea's Yonhap News about his visit to Pyongyang in a Facebook post (archived links here and here).
The report says Kim, as the then-chairman of the civic group Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, travelled to North Korea via Beijing to discuss receiving the remains of Korean forced labourers during World War II from Japan, as well as expanding civilian exchanges between the two Koreas (archived link).
Kim's visit came on the heels of the first inter-Korean summit in over a decade and was widely reported in local media at the time, including here, here and here (archived links here, here and here).
One of these reports also included the same visa photo published on Kim's Facebook page, alongside a caption that reads: "A North Korean visa posted by KCRC Chairman Kim Hong-gul to his social media page on the 16th" (archived link).
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
