North Korean authorities have spent 2026 tightening control over how people speak and behave, part of an effort to block outside cultural influence. Now they are cracking down on a hand gesture popular among teenagers: the finger heart.
A Daily NK source in South Pyongan province said students at a senior middle school in Kaechon were recently caught exchanging finger hearts. The gesture surfaced during class and during group gymnastics sessions. School officials criticized the students and forced them to write self-criticism statements.
The finger heart is made by crossing the thumb and index finger into a small heart shape. It spread worldwide alongside the rise of K-pop and the broader Korean Wave, and abroad it is often called the Korean finger heart.
School officials pressed students on where they had seen the gesture and who had first introduced it. The practice had already spread so widely, though, that tracing its origin proved difficult, the source said.
In the end, the school’s Socialist Patriotic Youth League branch took the lead. The league is North Korea’s mass youth political organization, tasked with enforcing ideological discipline among people under 30. It labeled the finger heart a non-socialist element and issued sweeping warnings to the student body.
The youth league accused students of blindly copying something from others. Officials told them they had forgotten their duty as league members to stay faithful to their responsibilities, the source said. Students were then made to write statements pledging to weigh their words and actions against party ideology. They also pledged to guard against behavior that undermines the country’s own way of life.
Part of a broader campaign against foreign culture
North Korea has long relied on laws such as the Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act, which criminalizes owning or spreading foreign media. That law, along with similar measures, has been used to restrict South Korean-style speech, clothing and hairstyles. State organizations and propaganda outlets have also pushed ideological campaigns urging teenagers to bring their clothing and behavior into line with official standards.
Even so, the finger heart has reportedly caught on fast among North Korean teenagers. It offers a new way to greet each other and signal closeness without speaking, and it rarely draws attention.
The gesture spread quickly, the source said, because there is no chance of misspeaking, and people can use it even from a distance. Close friends exchange it as a kind of joke, or to mean they like someone or are glad to see them. It has become so common that asking where it started barely means anything anymore, the source added.
It is likely that controlling teenagers’ everyday habits of expression will prove difficult. That holds true no matter how aggressively North Korean authorities try to block outside culture.
The state has focused on blocking South Korean speech patterns. In response, teenagers have started expressing emotion through hand gestures instead of words, the source said. Gestures like the finger heart are easy to copy and have already spread widely among students, but cracking down alone is unlikely to stamp it out, the source added.
North Korean authorities have steadily widened the scope of their control, from speech and behavior to clothing and hairstyles. Yet teenagers keep finding quiet ways to encounter and embrace outside culture, skirting the edges of enforcement as they go.
Reporting from inside North Korea
Daily NK operates networks of sources inside North Korea who document events in real-time and transmit information through secure channels. Unlike reporting based on state media, satellite imagery, or defector accounts from years past, our journalism comes directly from people currently living under the regime. We verify reports through multiple independent sources and cross-reference details before publication.
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September 4, 2026 at 07:22PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)