With charming understatement, Vice-Minister of Culture Hong Kwang Sun says the song is "just a powerful trumpet call of the revolution encouraging the army and people in the drive to build a thriving nation as well as a stirring drumbeat of victory."

By now we know that Kim Jong Un is not dead.

But late Friday, in a flurry of internet attention, the young North Korean dictator was reported assassinated in Beijing. 

Stop the presses.

Here's what happened: China's microblogging site, Sina Weibo, reported that Kim Jong Un was shot dead in the North Korean embassy in Beijing at around 2 a.m. The rumor appeared more respectable when it was reiterated on a somewhat state-affiliated news source in Hong Kong.

Then, it hopped the wires over to Twitter, where it enjoyed a vigorous second wind. Reuters, Gawker, Huffington Post and, yours truly, GlobalPost, everyone had a say.

More from GlobalPost: Kim Jong Un, dead or alive?

Sightings of cars and security outside the embassy in Beijing fanned the flames, and the rumors took on a life of their own. In the age of social media, they go far and fast. And when rumors pertain to a place as closed as North Korea, where it's hard to verify anything ever, they could always turn out to be true.

Thus you get the cocktail by which Kim Jong Un was effectively assassinated by Twitter.

So, what is there to say about it now that the dust has settled?

Josh Benton, the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab in Cambridge, Mass., said that he thought "news organizations by and large did a fine job resisting the urge to report those rumors as fact."

"When they were reported, they were reported as rumors on Twitter, which is what they were," he wrote by email Monday.

Some news sources, like CNN, did seek out US intelligence officials to ask them whether these rumors had any validity. Most news sources simply reiterated the rumors, though called them such.

More from GlobalPost: After Kim Jong Il

Bradley Martin, an ardent North Korea watcher and journalism professor, said the onus is on us, the consumers of news.

"In today's 24-hour news cycle," he wrote by email, "there's not much we can do to stop news organizations from spreading such rumors first, checking on them later. We just have to be skeptical consumers of news."

And what should we have thought?

Well, Martin said for starters the "'news' was improbable, first because the security system for protecting the North Korean dictator is extremely elaborate, with separate security organizations spying on one another to make sure no one goes off the reservation."

"Kim Jong Un may some day annoy people sufficiently ... " Martin wrote, "that they plot against him, but this report came so quickly after his accession to power that it seemed highly doubtful any elements opposed to his rule would have had time and opportunity to organize sufficiently to carry out a plot."

Indeed, there are pockets of resistance that appear to be growing in the North. And check out this image of the young leader reprimanding the North Korean army. That's bound to kill morale.

But really, the most interesting thing to come out of Kim Jong Un's Twitter assassination is the fact that China allowed the rumor to spread in the first place.

China's Sina Weibo is often likened to Twitter, but the fact of the matter, as Regina McCombs at Poynter Institute pointed out, is that it is "not a free and open Twitter space. It's a very controlled and monitored space."

So, from a geopolitical perspective, it's interesting that China opted to let these rumors fly. It suggests that all is not well between China and North Korea.

Perhaps in his attempts to consolidate power, Kim Jong Un isn't stepping in line enough for China's liking.

As Adam Cathcart, editor of SinoNK.com, wrote in The Diplomat:

"All this suggests significant strains in China’s relations with North Korea. China has indicated it wants Kim Jong Un to relax the country’s militarism and open up to investment under Chinese protection. And the fact is he’s not doing that."

China also allowed recent coverage of a book by a Japanese journalist who interviewed Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Il's passed-over eldest son, over a number of years. Kim Jong Nam was overtly critical of the Kim dynasty, and China allowed that to circulate, too.

More from GlobalPost: Kim Jong Nam disses new North Korea

It hardly comes as a surprise that the passed-over eldest son of Kim Jong Il has been criticizing hereditary succession.

In a soon-to-be-published book, “My father Kim Jong Il and Me,” Kim Jong Nam reportedly rails against the system in North Korea and calls his half-brother and current ruler, Kim Jong Un, a pawn of the ruling elite.

The book is based on a collection of interviews and emails between Jong Nam and Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi, who told the Telegraph that he built a relationship with Jong Nam after the pair met in Beijing in 2004.

GlobalPost in-depth series: After Kim Jong Il

Jong Nam has been spotted from time to time in Macau, where he lives in exile, and elsewhere in China. Usually, his name appears in the press next to the word "playboy."

Jong Nam reportedly told Gomi before Kim Jong Il passed away that North Korea was stuck. It needed economic reforms to survive. But those very reforms would lead to the collapse of the Kim dynasty.

More from GlobalPost: What's next for North Korea?

He wrote to Gomi on Dec. 17:

It is obvious that [the] economy will collapse without reforms, but the reforms will lead to a crisis of the collapse of the regime.

On Jan. 3, Jong Nam wrote more specifically about Kim Jong Un, who he said was merely a figurehead.

I question how a young heir with two years [of training as a successor] would be able to inherit ... absolute power. It is likely that the existing power elites will succeed my father by keeping the young successor as a symbol.

Sour grapes?

Word on the street is that Kim Jong Nam was once first in line to succeed his father, as birth order would suggest. But it wasn't meant to be.

In 2001, Jong Nam fell out with his father following an incident at Tokyo's Narita airport, where he was nailed for trying to get through on a fake Dominican passport. Jong Nam fled to Macau and has been living it up ever since.