South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has ordered a crackdown on an epidemic of digital sex crimes targeting women and girls who become the unwitting victims of deepfake pornography.
Yoon’s criticism of the use, recently reported in South Korean media, of the Telegram messaging app to create and share fake, sexually explicit images and videos came amid warnings that all women were potential victims.
Police will “aggressively” pursue people who make and spread the material in a seven-month campaign due to start on Wednesday, the Yonhap news agency said, with a focus on those who exploit children and teenagers.
After a long struggle to stamp out molka – secretly filmed material of a sexual nature – South Korea is now battling a wave of deepfake images.
“Deepfake videos targeting unspecified individuals have been rapidly spreading through social media,” Yoon told a cabinet meeting, according to his office. “Many victims are minors, and most perpetrators have also been identified as teenagers.”
He called on authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them”.
According to the country’s police agency, 297 cases of deepfake crimes of a sexual nature were reported in the first seven months of the year – up from 180 last year and nearly double the number in 2021, when data first began to be collated. Of the 178 people charged, 113 were teenagers.
But the problem is believed to be more serious than the official figures suggest.
One Telegram chatroom has attracted about 220,000 members who create and share deepfake images by doctoring photographs of women and girls. South Korean media said the victims include university students, teachers and military personnel.
“The perpetrators have used photos of female soldiers in uniform to treat them solely as sexual objects,” the Centre for Military Human Rights Korea, a counselling organisation, said, according to Yonhap.
Perpetrators reportedly used social media platforms such as Instagram to save or screen-capture photos of victims, which are then used to create deepfake pornographic material.
One analysis by South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper highlighted Telegram channels it said were being used to share deepfakes of female university and high and middle school students.
The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union said it had learned of sexual deepfakes involving school students and had asked the education ministry to investigate.
The investigation into sexually explicit deepfake images is expected to inflict further damage on Telegram’s reputation in South Korea, where the app was used to operate an online sexual blackmail ring.
In 2020, the leader of the ring, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 42 years in prison for blackmailing at least 74 women, including 16 teenagers, into sending degrading and sometimes violent sexual imagery of themselves.
Under South Korean law, making sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention of distributing them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of 50m won ($37,500).
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed reporting.
