Name: South Korea faces deepfake porn 'emergency' | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-09-02T11:48:52.000Z
Duration: 2 min 43 s
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In South Korea, a large number of online chat rooms have been found to be sharing sexually explicit, deepfake images of women.

In an emergency meeting, South Korean authorities called on Telegram and other platforms to work with them to delete and block that kind of content.

The images, which are generated using artificial intelligence, combine the face of a real person with a fake body.

It comes as the founder of Telegram, Pavel Zhurov, was arrested as he landed on a private plane in Paris over the weekend.

He's being held as part of a French investigation into child abuse images, drug trafficking and fraud on the messaging app.

For more on this, I've been speaking to journalist Jennifer Moon, who's based in Seoul.

The latest one being, there's been a series of emergency meetings, like you said, since the president has called for digital sex crimes to be thoroughly investigated.

Now, that in the wake of local media reports, the sexually explicit, deepfake images and videos of South Korean women, especially that of underage girls at junior high schools and universities, were often found in Telegram chat rooms.

Now, one Telegram chat room had a user of 227,000 people.

That's sparking public outrage here in Korea.

Of course, as you know, South Korea has one of the fastest average internet speeds.

And with that, according to activists, it also has an acute epidemic of digital sex crimes, including rent porn and the use of spy cameras with inadequate legislation to punish offenders.

And this time around, it's deepfake digital sex crimes.

I mean, do they have the power to crack down on this?

We'll have to wait and see what comes about from these meetings.

But online deepfake sex crimes cannot be left alone here in Korea as they've surged.

They've surged by a double in the number in this year compared to the number in 2021 when they first began to collect data.

Now, what's more interesting and more serious is that the victims are usually female and include school students as well as women in uniform in this country.

Recently, there's been a deepfake abuse rapidly escalating in school nationwide.

 But what's more concerning here is the fact that the creators, a large number of offenders, are also believed to be minors, according to authorities.