South Korea’s president has called for intensified efforts to “eradicate” the nation’s growing digital sex crime crisis, as a surge of deepfake pornography targeting young women has come to light.
Authorities, journalists, and social media users have recently uncovered numerous chat groups where members were producing and sharing sexually explicit deepfake images, including those featuring underage girls.
Deepfakes, created using artificial intelligence, typically merge the face of a real person with a fabricated body.
In response to these revelations, South Korea’s media regulator has convened an emergency meeting.
On Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol urged authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them.”
During a cabinet meeting, he highlighted the disturbing trend: “Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media.
The victims are often minors, and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers.”
The chat groups, associated with individual schools and universities across the country, were discovered on the messaging app Telegram in the past week.
Teenage students primarily used the platform to upload photos of people they knew—classmates and teachers—which were then transformed into explicit deepfake images by other users.
This development follows the recent arrest of Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of Telegram, on charges related to child pornography, drug trafficking, and fraud on the encrypted messaging app.
Source-BBC
