South Korea is facing a deepfake pornography 'emergency' as thousands spread elicit photos
South Korea is doing a thorough investigation into its deepfake pornography issue as thousands of fake, sexually explicit images and videos are spreading online.
In a report by The Guardian, the country's president Yoon Suk Yeol has now ordered a crackdown on the issue after it was discovered that many women and girls have become the target of deepfake images of a sexual nature that are being spread online.
For instance, one chatroom on Telegram has about 220,000 members who create and share deepfake images by doctoring photographs of women and girls.
The victims are said to include university students, teachers, and military personnel. The images were reportedly created through saving or screen-capturing photos of the victims through their Instagram accounts.
"Deepfake videos targeting unspecified individuals have been rapidly spreading through social media. Many victims are minors, and most perpetrators have also been identified as teenagers," Yoon said.
"The perpetrators have used photos of female soldiers in uniform to treat them solely as sexual objects," the Centre for Military Human Rights Korea said according to Yonhap News Agency.
Authorities have now been ordered to "aggressively" go after those who make and spread the explicit materials in a seven-month campaign beginning this August and to "thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them." They will especially focus on those who are targeting minors such as children and teenagers.
Yoon stressed that young men needed to be better educated to build a "healthy media culture," according to BBC.
"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.
Previously, data gathered by local police revealed that 297 cases of deepfake pornography were documented in the first seven months of the year. This is higher than the 180 cases recorded in 2023.
The crackdown comes after the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested by authorities due to cases of alleged child pornography, drug trafficking, and fraud that were taking place on the messaging app.