South Korea faces deepfake porn ’emergency’

South Korea’s leader has urged regulators to do more to “eradicate” the country’s online sexual violence epidemic, amid a storm of deepfake sex targeting younger women.

Government, journalists, and users of social media recently discovered a large number of chat rooms where members were posting sexually explicit “deepfake” images, some of which were young girls.

Deepfakes are usually combined with false body parts and the faces of real people to create artificial intelligence.

South Korea’s internet regulation is holding an emergency appointment in the midst of the discoveries.

Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, issued an instruction on Tuesday to “deeply check and address these online sex crimes to eliminate them.”

At a case meeting, President Yoon stated at a recent time that “deepfake videos targeting an undefined number of people have been circulating quickly on social media.

” The culprits are mostly youth, and the patients are frequently juveniles.”

Over the past month, a number of chat groups that are connected to specific schools and universities across the nation were discovered on the social media app Telegram.

People may post photos of people they knew, including classmates and teachers, to sexually explicit algorithmic images, mainly from teenagers, and other people would do the same.

The revelations follow the imprisonment of the Russian-born chairman of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, as part of an investigation into child pornography, drug trafficking and scams on the encrypted communications app.

South Korea’s history of modern sex crimes is murky.

In a incident known as the nth-room, it became clear that men were using a Telegram chatroom to coerce numerous young people into having sexual relations. The team’s ring-leader, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 42 years in jail.

Online deepfake sexual acts have surged, according to North Korean officers. In the first seven weeks of this year, 297 cases were reported, an increase from 180 the previous season and 160 in 2021. Over the past three decades, youngsters were to blame for more than two-thirds of the crimes.

The Korean Teachers Union, however, believes more than 200 universities have been affected in this latest series of situations. According to the Ministry of Education, there have been a lot of deepfakes targeting instructors in the last few years.

Park Ji-hyun, a women’s rights advocate and former time president of the major opposition Democratic Party, said the state needed to consider a “national crisis” in response to South Korea’s algorithmic porn problem.

People may join the chatroom without going through the identification process, according to Ms Park, who wrote on X.

” For incidents are occurring in middle schools, high schools, and colleges across the country”.

To create a “healthy internet society”, President Yoon said young people needed to be better educated.

It is obviously a criminal act that uses technology to hide behind the weapon of anonymity, he said, despite being frequently dismissed as” only a game.”

On Wednesday, the media regulator in Korea will meet to discuss how to handle this most recent issue, but authorities opponents have questioned whether it is capable of handling it.

” I do n’t believe this government, which dismisses structural gender discrimination as mere’ personal disputes’, can effectively address these issues”, Bae Bok-joo, a women’s rights activist and a former member of the minor Justice Party, told the AFP news agency.

Before coming into business, President Yoon said North Korean people did not suffer from” structural female discrimination”, despite evidence to the contrary.

Women are paid on average a third less than South Asian people in senior jobs in South Korea’s publicly listed companies, which is the worst gender pay gap of any wealthy nation in the world.

To this, add a pervasive culture of sexual abuse, which is fueled by the rising tech sector, which has contributed to an increase in online sex crimes.

These have recently included instances of women using the restroom or dressed in changing areas while being filmed using tiny hidden cameras, or” spycams.”