The Porn North Koreans Are Searching For Online (Illegally)

Porn may be forbidden in North Korea, but that isn't stopping people from searching for (and finding) it.

According to new data from Pornhub, the site receives regular incoming traffic from North Korea — and what people are searching for is interesting, to say the least.

While the site says in their data release that traffic from the country is relatively minimal at a few thousand visits over the course of the last two years, it was enough data to pull together some insight on the most popular porn in North Korea.

For starters, Pornhub's North Korea insights showed that a majority of the searches related to porn from other countries.

The most searched-for terms were: "Chinese," "Mongolian," "Japanese game show," "Korean," and "Japanese." The most-viewed categories, on the other hand, included "Japanese," "Asian," "big tits," and "cartoon."

"Most other countries we have studied tend to search for and view porn featuring their fellow citizens more than any other type," Pornhub says, "so this may support the idea that searches in North Korea are coming from foreign visitors to the country."

Also interesting? Pornhub found that while mobile devices account for roughly 75% of traffic to the site worldwide, only about 36% of traffic from North Korea came from smartphones.

As a Guardian report from 2015 notes, porn movies and magazines are very rare in North Korea, and even if you come across one, they were likely to have been smuggled in and sent out on the black market.

"If someone gets caught with porn – or distributing it – they get sent to a correctional prison camp," the report points out. The rise of the internet, of course, makes it much easier for us to find porn on the down-low — and while more research would need to be done to uncover the state of pornography in North Korea as a whole (and not just based off one porn site), these stats are certainly an interesting insight.

(This article previously appeared on refinery29.com and was written by Kimberly Truong)