THE president has called for an investigation into deepfake porn after media reports that Telegram chatrooms were sharing explicit images of minors at schools and universities sparked public outrage.
South Korea has the world’s fastest average Internet speeds but activists say it also has an acute epidemic of digital sex crimes, including spycams and revenge porn, with inadequate legislation to punish the offenders.
A South Korean broadcaster reported last week that students at a university were running an illegal Telegram chatroom, sharing deepfake pornographic material of female colleagues, one of a slew of high-profile cases that has triggered widespread public anger.
“Recently, deepfake videos targeting unspecified individuals have been rapidly spreading through social media,” President Yoon Suk-yeol told a Cabinet meeting yesterday, according to his office.
“Many victims are minors, and most perpetrators have also been identified as teenagers,” he said.
Yoon called for authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them completely”.
“It’s an exploitation of technology while relying on the protection of anonymity. It’s a clear criminal act,” he added.
Perpetrators reportedly used social media platforms such as Instagram to save or screenshot photos of victims, which were then used to create deepfake pornographic materials.
Online deepfake sex crimes have surged, according to South Korean police who say 297 cases were reported in the first seven months of the year.
That’s up from 180 last year and nearly double the number in 2021 when data first began to be collated.
Most of the accused were teenagers and people in their 20s, the police said.
“The biggest issue with online sexual abuse is that their deletion is extremely difficult.
“Victims often suffer without even being aware of it,” Bae Bok-joo, a women’s rights activist and a former member of the minor Justice Party, said.
“I don’t believe this government, which dismisses structural gender discrimination as mere ‘personal disputes’, can effectively address these issues.”
Yoon won office in 2022 in part on a campaign pledge to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, which his supporters said was an obsolete backwater of “radical feminism”.
Before being elected to the top office, Yoon also claimed that South Korean women did not suffer from “systemic gender discrimination”, despite evidence to the contrary on the gender wage gap and female workforce participation.
The government needed to declare a “national emergency” over deepfake porn, said Park Ji-hyun, a women’s rights activist and former interim leader of the main opposition Democratic Party.
“Deepfake sexual abuse materials can be created in just one minute, and anyone can enter the chatroom without any verification process,” she wrote on social media platform X.
“Such incidents are occurring in middle schools, high schools and universities across the country,” she added, alleging that there were hundreds of thousands of perpetrators of such abuse.
South Korea has successfully prosecuted perpetrators of online abuse.
Telegram’s reputation has been tarnished for some years in South Korea after it emerged that an online sexual blackmail ring was operating mostly in the app’s chatrooms.
In 2020, the leader of the ring, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for blackmailing at least 74 women, including 16 teenagers, into sending increasingly degrading and sometimes violent sexual imagery of themselves.
Making sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention to distribute them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of 50 million won (RM164,000) under South Korea’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Victims Protection Act. — AFP/Reuters
