Lots of strange things happen on YouTube. Rashomon-like retellings of the same birthday party, over and over again. People eating candy and calling it entertainment. Casey Couture. But right now, something especially strange is happening on Google’s great video platform, something I never thought I’d see, and yet probably should have seen coming: a popular YouTuber is gallivanting around North Korea. And he’s loving it!

Louis Cole is a 33-year-old vlogger from the U.K. with about 1.8 million subscribers on his FunForLouis YouTube channel. He’s a highly competent travel vlogger, part of a subset of daily YouTubers that also includes Ben Brown: British lads, many of them fans and acolytes of American vlogger Casey Neistat, obsessed with cameras and time-lapses and documenting their coffee habits. Cole’s videos are well-edited and engaging, and the sheer constancy of his travel—he’s forever on the go, it seems—ensures that his frequent videos are rarely dull or un-special, as so much on YouTube is. Cole, like his daily vlogger brethren, is relentlessly positive, projecting a chill-dude, laid-back, good-vibes vibe—sometimes to a pathological degree.

Which brings me to his travels in North Korea, a series of videos that he’s currently uploading. Cole and a bunch of other vloggers recently went on a trip through the reclusive, politically repressive nation, beaming back positive depictions of people and places that all seem . . . awfully tidy, judging from what we know—or, to be fair, what politicians and journalists tell us—about North Korea. It all seems highly suspicious, this vision of a country, a North Korean media tour similar to Vice’s fascinating documentary, only without any of the critical context and perspective. (Cole responded to these charges on Wednesday; see below for his comments.)

In the description section of one of his North Korea videos, Cole writes, “I’m trying to focus on positive things in the country and combat the purely negative image we see in the Media.” Which, O.K., sure. But as another vlogger shows us in his own video from the DPRK (vloggers seem to be going there en masse), these videos are meant to capture a very carefully curated vision of a country whose human rights abuses are “without parallel in the contemporary world,” according to Human Rights Watch. Cole has, so far, not really made mention of any of that, choosing instead to go for a light tone, oohing and ahhing over abundant food in a country ravaged by hunger.

Some viewers have pointed this out to Cole in the comments sections of his videos. One commenter, Chris Prouse, (herself a vlogger) wrote, “I appreciate that you’re showing us a different part of the world, and North Korea might have built monuments that are symbolic of unity . . . but it’s pretty hard to ignore North Korea’s human rights violations, and I hope it’s something you mention after the trip, for the sake of helping people gather a balanced, informed view of what’s happening there.” Cole hasn’t engaged much, if at all, with that critique.