Desperately trying to quell the rising public and political outcry over the issue, South Korean authorities urged Telegram and other social media platforms on Wednesday to cooperate with them in deleting and blocking deep fake sexually explicit content, stating that it is a collaborative, rather than a unilateral, operation.
These are the direct remedies after several local news outlets published articles, according to which, sexually explicit deepfake depicting South Korean women images and videos were mostly found in the Telegram chat room.
According to the Korea Communications Standards Commission, a 24-hour victim hotline will also be established and the number of the regulatory staff tasked with monitoring digital sex crimes will double from 70, her word added.
Reporting on the issue, Deputy Director General of Korean National Police Agency said there will be efforts to minimize online sex crime for a period of seven months.
As for the problem of sexual deepfake images on social network sites, the media regulator plans to establish a consultative body to facilitate cooperation with providers. The statement was given in a meeting by the Chairperson of the Commission Ryu Hee-lim.
It seeks to have a regularized communication with such companies through a body based in South Korea, which will serve as a hub for companies without an office in South Korea who wishes to communicate regularly with such bodies.
“Creating, holding and disseminating deepfake sex assault videos are violent acts that violate the natural dignity and civil liberty of an individual,” Ryu stated.
Apart from Telegram, the commission stated that it will be looking to collaborate with X, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as Google’s YouTube. None of the companies responded to the requests for comment from Reuters.
Abuses of Telegram in South Korea were noted at the exact time what police arrested Pavel Durov who is the founder of Telegram and is also of Russian origin, this weekend – a segment of an ongoing French investigation into child pornography and sex and drug trafficking, and fraud on an encrypted messaging portal.
The number of cases related to the sex crime of deepfakes in South Korea skyrocketed from the collated number of 156 in 2021 to 297 till this year, most of these criminal activities have been committed by my age mates that is teenager according to the police.
In most of these cases the victims are students or young school girls including the female soldiers of the army of South Korea.
This year alone, South Koreans have filed over 6300 help requests with the Korea Communications Standards Commission for the removal of deepfake body sex-content. Last year the Commission managed to assist with the removal of content in nearly 7200 such cases.
According to Kim Yeo-jin, the head of the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center, Telegram is now the predominant platform for sex offenders distributing sexually explicit deepfake contents and more preventive actions are needed from the police within the context.
In many instances, victims have complained that police have told them how no point was there in putting a report because it was on Telegram and it would be difficult to apprehend the perpetrators, she said.
A police spokesperson declined immediate comment on a request by Reuters.
Certainly, information about South Korean official requests to social media companies and apropos of those companies’ replies is rare.
However, data released by police to the legislator Kim Young-bae and dated 2020 revealed that within the confines of concerns of digital sex crime, police made 7 requests via email to telegram requesting assistance between February and August of that year only to have all the requests unanswered by telegram.
