South Korea vows tougher approach after outrage over sexual deepfakes in Telegram chat rooms

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday called for a thorough investigation into digital sex crimes after media reports revealed that sexually explicit deepfake photos and videos of South Korean women were frequently found in Telegram chat rooms.

The domestic media reports of the past few days coincide with the arrest over the weekend of Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of Telegram, as part of a French investigation into child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud via the encrypted messaging app.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission, the state media regulator, is holding a meeting on Wednesday to discuss measures to counter sexually explicit deepfakes.

“It is an exploitation of technology while relying on the protection of anonymity. It is a clear criminal act,” Yoon said during a televised cabinet meeting.

Yoon spoke about sexual crimes on social media in general and did not mention Telegram by name.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

South Korean police say online deepfake sex crimes have skyrocketed, with 297 cases reported in the first seven months of the year, up from 180 last year and nearly double the number in 2021, when the data was first collected.

According to police, most of the suspects are teenagers and people in their twenties.

Local media reports included a viral analysis by the Hankyoreh newspaper, which investigated Telegram channels where deepfakes of female university, high school and college students were allegedly being shared.

The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union said this week that it has been notified of several cases in which schoolchildren have been victims of sexual deepfakes and has called on the Ministry of Education to investigate the matter.

Sexually explicit deepfakes have also been found in Telegram chat rooms targeting female military personnel, according to the Military Sexual Abuse Victim Support Center, a group that supports victims of sexual abuse in the military.

Telegram’s reputation has been discredited in South Korea for several years after it came to light that an online blackmail network was operating primarily in the app’s chat rooms.

In 2020, the gang’s leader, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for blackmailing at least 74 women, including 16 teenagers, into sending them increasingly degrading and sometimes violent sexual images of themselves.

Creating sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention of distributing them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of 50 million won ($37,500) under South Korea’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Victim Protection Act.

($1 = 1,331.8500 won)

In this illustration taken on February 21, 2023, a keyboard is placed in front of a displayed Telegram logo. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File photo