TRIGGER WARNING: Please note that the article discusses topics of revenge porn, and sexual violence of all ages.
An investigation into South Korea’s deepfake porn epidemic has found online chatrooms on the social media app Telegram linked to over 500 universities and secondary schools. In these groups, young men and teenagers uploaded photos of their often underage classmates and teachers and used AI to turn them into realistic sexually explicit images. The deep-nudes were then shared and used to threaten and intimidate girls.
This isn’t the first time South Korea has faced uproar about digital sex crimes. In 2019, Telegram chatrooms were discovered in which men blackmailed young women into performing sexual acts. The case is more commonly known as the ‘Nth room‘ scandal after a Netflix documentary. 3,757 people linked to the crimes were arrested and 245 are currently serving time in prison.
South Korea’s spy-camera epidemic from 2018 is another example of this type of violence. Women took to the streets in protest after spy cameras were being hidden in public toilets and changing rooms in shops, gyms and swimming pools. The footage was then uploaded to pornography sites. Over 6,000 cases of spy cameras were reported to the police every year, and less than 2% of those caught served a prison sentence.
“less than 2% of those caught served a prison sentence.”
The trend in sex crimes against women could be linked to the country’s fast-changing values, says Flora Smit, Korea expert, in an interview with VRT Nieuws, the Flemish press. South Korea is a country in which traditional values have had the upper hand for a long time. With men acting as the breadwinners, women were encouraged to stay home and look after their families. Whilst progress is being made as of late, South Korea still has the largest gender pay gap out of all OECD countries, at a staggering 32%. This growing clash between traditional and modern values could feel threatening to young men, says Smit. As women gain respect and influence in society, men often fear they may lose theirs.
Smit suggests that the latest deepfake epidemic could come from a place of frustration, rather than solely teenage sexual fantasies. “This is about women being humiliated and men having power”, she says. By inducing fear in women, men gain control of their actions, even anonymously over the internet. “This has less to do with porn and a lot more with power”, says Smit.
““This has less to do with porn and a lot more with power”, says Smit.”
The Telegram app makes the epidemic difficult to control. Messages can be ‘self-destructing’, which means that they disappear after a certain time period and cannot be retrieved as evidence in a case. The end-to-end encryption system of the chat app makes for the perfect breeding ground for criminal activities such as creating and sharing deep-nudes, as well as other criminal activities that take place on the app.
In the South Korean justice system, perpetrators can spend up to five years in prison for creating deep-nudes with the intent to distribute them. In the UK, similar laws are in place that make it illegal to create and share sexually explicit images of another person, regardless of malicious intent. In recent legislative progress, a law was announced that would make it an offence to even create or possess explicit deepfakes without consent, but the legislation was put on hold when the General Election was called.
President Yoon Suk Yeol does not take these crimes lightly and wants to focus on a better education to build a healthier media culture. However, not all have faith in his words as he consistently denies the country’s systemic gender discrimination and came to power with proposals to scrap the gender equality ministry.
