- By Ashish Singh
- Tue, 27 Aug 2024 06:44 PM (IST)
- Source:Reuters
Following media allegations that deepfake videos and photos of South Korean women were regularly found in Telegram chat rooms with graphic sexual content, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol urged a thorough inquiry into digital sex crimes. As part of a French investigation into child pornography, drug trafficking, and fraud on the encrypted messaging app, Pavel Durov, the creator of Telegram, was detained over the weekend. This development has coincided with the assertionvene on Wednesday to discuss ways to combat sexually explicit deepfakes. It's a technological misuse that relies on anonymity protection. At a cabinet meeting that was broadcast on television, Yoon said, "It's an obvious criminal act."
Yoon did not specifically reference Telegram when discussing sex offences on social media in general. Remarks from Telegram were not immediately available after Reuters reached out to them. According to South Korean authorities, there has been a significant increase in online deepfake sex crimes. In the first seven months of this year, 297 incidents were registered. That's more than double the amount from 2021, when data started to be gathered, and up from 180 last year.
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According to the authorities, the majority of the accused were youths and adults in their 20s. The Hankyoreh newspaper's study, which went viral, examined Telegram channels and claimed that deepfakes of female university, high school, and middle school kids were being exchanged. This analysis was one of the stories from the local media.
This week, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union announced that it had learnt of a few instances in which schoolchildren had fallen victim to sexual deepfakes. It has requested that the Ministry of education look into the situation. A nonprofit that aids victims of sexual abuse in the military, the Military Sexual Abuse Victim Support Centre, has discovered sexually explicit deepfakes directed towards female military personnel in Telegram chatrooms.
In South Korea, Telegram's image has suffered for a while now due to reports that an online extortion ring was mostly active in the chat rooms on the app. Cho Ju-bin, the ring's head, was given a 40-year prison term in 2020 for using blackmail to force at least 74 women—including 16 teenagers—to transmit increasingly offensive and occasionally violent sexual images of themselves.
The Sexual Violence Prevention and Victims Protection Act of South Korea stipulates that creating sexually explicit deepfakes with the aim to distribute them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of fifty million won ($37,500).