South Korea's President urged Authorities on Deepfake Explicit Images Targeting young Women

 

South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol, on Tuesday has urged authorities to do more to address the country's digital sex crimes epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young females.

Authorities and social media users recently identified a large number of chat groups where members were creating and sharing explicit deepfake images of underage girls.

Deepfake is created by artificial intelligence, and have the ability to combine the face of a real person to a fake body.

Advertisement 

The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers according to president Yoon at a cabinet meeting. 

The spate of chat groups, linked to individual schools and universities across the country, where discovered on the social media app Telegram over the past week.

User's mainly teenage students, upload images of people they knew both classmates and teachers, and other users would turn them into explicit deepfake images. 

The discoveries followed the arrest of the Telegram founder Pavel Durov, after it was alleged drug trafficking, child pornography and fraud were taking place on the encrypted messaging app.

South Korea has a dark history of digital sex crimes, in 2019 men where using Telegram chat group to blackmail dozens of young women into performing sexual acts. A total of 297 cases were reported in the first seven months of this year, up from 180 in the whole of last year and 160 in 2021, More than 200 schools have been affected in the incidents according to South Korea's Ministry of Education.

Advertisement 

President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated, it's a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity. These have previously included cases of women being filmed by tiny hidden cameras or spycams as they used the toilet or undressed in Changing rooms.

Korea’s media regulators is meeting on Wednesday to discuss how to tackle this latest crisis, but opponents of the government have questioned whether it is up to the job.