BBCLast Saturday, a Telegram text popped up on Heejin’s telephone from an unidentified receiver. Your photos and private data have been leaked, the statement read. Come discuss”.
As the college student entered the chatroom to read the message, she received a picture of herself taken a few years ago while she was still in college. It was followed by a second photograph using the same image, only this one was biologically explicit, and false.
Terrified, Heejin, which is not her real label, did not respond, but the graphics kept coming. Her face was attached to a brain engaged in a sexual act in all of them, using cutting-edge algorithmic technology.
Deepfakes, the majority of which combine a true woman’s face with a fake, sexually explicit figure, are increasingly being generated using artificial intelligence.
” I was petrified, I felt but alone”, Heejin told the BBC.
But she was not only.
Ko Narin, a North Korean journalist, had just published what would turn out to be the biggest shovel of her career two days prior. At two of the state’s top universities, it had just been revealed that police were looking into deep-fake video, and Ms Ko agreed that more must be done.
She began searching social media and discovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging apps Telegram where people shared photos of trusted people and used AI to instantly turn them into false pornographic images.
Every second, persons were sharing photos of women they knew and threatening to turn them into deepfakes, Ms Ko said.
Mr Ko discovered that these organizations were targeting college students as well. There were even areas set aside for particular middle schools and high schools. She might even be given her own area if a lot of the information was made using pictures of a certain student. Broadly labelled “humiliation areas” or “friend of friend bedrooms”, they often come with tight passage words.
South Korea has been shocked by Ms. Ko’s record in the Hankyoreh news. Following the advice of authorities in France who lately charged Telegram’s Russian leader with offences relating to the game, police announced on Monday that they were considering launching an investigation into the company. The president has called for younger people to get better educated, and the government has vowed to impose tougher sanctions on those responsible.
The BBC reached out to Telegram for reply, and while it has not yet responded to this specific situation, it has recently stated that it actively searches its website for improper activity, including child sexual abuse. It said unknown action was taken against 45, 000 parties worldwide, in August only.
A “organized and organized process”
The BBC has looked over the information of a number of these chatrooms. One requestes that users post more than four photos of people, along with their names, ages, and hometown.
” I was shocked at how organized and comprehensive the procedure was,” said Ms. Ko. The most gruesome factor I found was a group of young students at a school with more than 2, 000 members.
In the weeks after Ms Ko’s article was published, women’s rights activists started to peruse Telegram to, and follow leads.
More than 500 institutions had been identified as target by the week’s finish. The exact number impacted, and the number of subjects, is still to be established, but many are believed to be under 16, which is South Korea’s age of consent. Teens themselves make up the majority of the suspects.
Heejin claimed that becoming more concerned about how many persons might have seen her deepfakes had she learned about the magnitude of the issue. Immediately she blamed herself. Should I have been more cautious if I had been posting my photos on social media and could n’t stop thinking that this had happened?
Numerous women and youth across the nation have since deactivated their balances immediately or removed their photos from social media, fearing that their exploitation will follow.
One college student, Ah-eun, whose contemporaries have been targeted, said,” We are frustrated and angry that we are having to judge our behavior and our use of social media when we have done nothing wrong.
One target at her school was told by officers not to bother looking into her case because it would be too difficult to find the killer and because it was” not really a violence” because” the pictures were fake,” according to Ah-eun.
News 1The messaging apps Telegram is at the center of this incident. Unlike people sites, which the regulators can obtain quickly, and then request for images get removed, Telegram is a private, encrypted messaging software.
People are often private, areas can be set to” secret” style, and their contents swiftly deleted without a trace. This has made it a perfect location for criminal activity to flourish.
Lawmakers and the officers retaliated past year with a powerful statement, promising to look into these crimes and prosecute the offenders.
Seoul National Police Agency announced on Monday that it would look into Telegram’s involvement in making available false pornographic pictures of babies.
The app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was charged in France last week with being complicit in a number of crimes related to the app, including enabling the sharing of child pornography.
Because Korea has previously experienced this crisis, women’s rights activists claim that the government in South Korea has allowed sexual abuse to continue unchecked for too long. In 2019, it became clear that a sex ring was coercing women and children into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves using Telegram.
Police at the time asked Telegram for help with their investigation, but the app ignored all seven of their requests. No action was taken against the platform because of censorship, despite the ringleader’s eventual sentence of more than 40 years in prison.
” They sentenced the main actors but otherwise neglected the situation, and I think this has exacerbated the situation”, said Ms Ko.
Park Jihyun, who, as a young student journalist, uncovered the Nth room sex-ring back in 2019, has since become a political advocate for victims of digital sex crimes. She claimed that since the deepfake scandal broke, she has been contacted by students and parents several times a day in tears.
They are terrified because they saw their school listed on a social media list.
In South Korea, Ms. Park has been leading calls for the government to regulate or even outlaw the app. The state must regulate these tech companies to protect its citizens, she said.” If these tech companies will not cooperate with law enforcement agencies, then the state must regulate them.”
Prior to this most recent crisis, South Korea’s Advocacy Centre for Online Sexual Abuse victims (ACOSAV ) was already aware of a significant increase in the number of underage victims of deepfake porn.
In 2023 they counselled 86 victims. Without counting the final seven days, that number increased to 238 in just the first eight months of this year.
One of the centre’s leaders, Park Seonghye, said over the past week her staff had been inundated with calls and were working around the clock. ” It’s been a full scale emergency for us, like a wartime situation”, she said.
There is now so much more footage than there was before thanks to the most recent deepfake technology, and we’re worried that it will only go up.
The center works with online platforms to remove harmful content and assists victims in counseling them. According to Ms. Park, there have been instances where Telegram has removed content at users ‘ request. ” So it’s not impossible”, she noted.
Women’s rights organizations claim that this is just the most recent instance of misogyny to occur online in South Korea despite the fact that new AI technology is allowing for easier victim exploitation.
First women were the target of numerous verbal abuse online. Then came the spy cam craze, where people were allegedly secretly filmed using restrooms and changing rooms.
” The root cause of this is structural sexism and the solution is gender equality”, read a statement signed by 84 women’s groups.
Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of the nation, has denied structural sexism, cut funding for victim support groups, and reinstituted the government’s gender equality ministry.
Getty ImagesLee Myung-hwa, who treats young sex offenders, agreed that although the outbreak of deepfake abuse might seem sudden, it had long been lurking under the surface. ” For teenagers, deepfakes have become part of their culture, they’re seen as a game or a prank”, said the counsellor, who runs the Aha Seoul Youth Cultural Centre.
Ms. Lee argued that it was important to educate young men, citing research that found that when you expose what constitutes sexual abuse, offenders become more aware of what constitutes sexual abuse, which prevents them from reoffending.
Meanwhile, the government has announced that it will punish those who publish deepfake images and punish those who view the porn. It will also increase the criminal sentences for those who publish deepfake images.
It comes in response to criticism that not enough criminals were punished. One of the issues is that the majority of offenders are teenagers, who are typically tried in youth courts and receive more lenient sentences.
Many of the chatrooms have been shut down since the first ones were discovered, but brand-new ones are almost certain to follow. The journalists reporting on this story have already been set up in a humiliation room. Ms Ko, who broke the news, said this had given her sleepless nights. ” I keep checking the room to see if my photo has been uploaded”, she said.
In South Korea, almost every teenage girl and young woman has experienced this type of anxiety. Ah-eun, the university student, said it had made her suspicious of her male acquaintances.
” I now ca n’t be certain people wo n’t commit these crimes behind my back, without me knowing”, she said. ” I’ve become hyper-vigilant in all my interactions with people, which ca n’t be good”.
Hosu Lee and Sunwook Lee provide additional reporting.