South Korea faces deepfake porn 'emergency'

South Korea’s president has urged authorities to do more to “eradicate” the country’s digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women.

Authorities, journalists and social media users recently identified a large number of chat groups where members were creating and sharing sexually explicit "deepfake" images – including some of underage girls.

Deepfakes are generated using artificial intelligence, and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body.

South Korea’s media regulator is holding an emergency meeting in the wake of the discoveries.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday instructed authorities to "thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them".

"Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media," President Yoon said at a cabinet meeting.

"The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers."

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

Users, mainly teenage students, would upload photos of people they knew – both classmates and teachers – and other users would then turn them into sexually explicit deepfake images.

The discoveries follow the arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, as part of an investigation into child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud on the encrypted messaging app.

South Korea has a dark history of digital sex crimes.

In 2019 it emerged that men were using a Telegram chatroom to blackmail dozens of young women into performing sexual acts, in a scandal known as nth-room. The group’s ring-leader, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 42 years in jail.

Online deepfake sex crimes have surged, according to South Korean police. 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. Teenagers were responsible for more than two-thirds of the offences over the past three years.

The Korean Teachers Union, meanwhile, believes more than 200 schools have been affected in this latest string of incidents. The number of deepfakes targeting teachers has surged in the past couple of years, according to the Ministry of Education.

Park Ji-hyun, a women’s rights activist and former interim leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said the government needed to declare a "national emergency" in response to South Korea's deepfake porn problem.

"Deepfake sexual abuse materials can be created in just one minute, and anyone can enter the chatroom without any verification process," Ms Park wrote on X.

"Such incidents are occurring in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country."

To build a "healthy media culture", President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated.

“Although it is often dismissed as ‘just a prank,’ it is clearly a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity," he said.

Korea’s media regulator 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.

"I don'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 office, President Yoon said South Korean women did not suffer from "systemic gender discrimination", despite evidence to the contrary.

Women hold just 5.8% of the executive positions in South Korea's publicly listed companies, and are paid on average a third less than South Korean men - giving the country the worst gender pay gap of any rich nation in the world.

To this can be added a pervasive culture of sexual harassment, fuelled by the booming tech industry, which has contributed to an explosion of digital sex crimes.

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.