Last Updated on 12/09/2024 by Arun jain
In 2020, as the South Korean authorities were chasing A blackmail ring Those who forced young women to make sexually explicit videos for paying viewers found something else floating in the dark of social media: lewd images clumsily attached to other people’s faces.
They didn’t know what to do with these early attempts at deepfake pornography. Finally, the National Assembly enacted a law in vague terms against those who manufactured and distributed it. But that has not stopped the wave of crime using AI technology, which has now taken over the country. Inappropriate online culture to new depths.
In the past two weeks, South Koreans have been shocked to learn that a growing number of young men and teenage boys have taken hundreds of social media images of classmates, teachers and military colleagues – almost all young women and girls, including minors – and used them for sexual purposes with the Deepfake app. Did to create exploitative pictures and video clips.
They spread the material through chat rooms on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, some of which have as many as 220,000 members. Deepfakes usually attach the victim’s face to the body in sexually explicit poses, taken from pornography. The technology is so sophisticated that it’s often hard for the average person to tell it’s fake, investigators say. As the country scrambles to deal with the threat, experts note that in South Korea, enthusiasm for new technologies sometimes outweighs concerns about their ethical implications.
But for many women, these deepfaxes are just the latest online manifestation of deep-rooted misogyny in their country — a culture that has now produced young people who find it fun to share sexually offensive images of women online.
“Korean society treats women as fellow human beings,” said Lee Yu-jin, a student whose university is among hundreds of middle schools, high schools and colleges where students have been victimized. She asked why the government had not done more “before it became digital culture to steal photos of friends and use them for sexual abuse”.
Online sexual violence is a growing problem globally, but South Korea is at the leading edge. Whether, and how, it can successfully combat the deepfake problem remains to be seen by policymakers, school officials and law enforcement elsewhere.
The country has an underbelly of sex crimes that have come to light frequently. One was South Korean guilty Running one of the world’s largest sites for child sexual abuse images. K-pop entertainer Pleaded guilty to facilitating prostitution through a nightclub. Police have been fighting for years Spycam Porn. and investigated the mastermind of a blackmail ring in 2020 A sentence of 40 years was awarded He is in jail for luring young women, including teenagers, to make videos sold online through Telegram chat rooms.
The emergence of easy-to-use deepfake technology has added an insidious dimension to such forms of sexual violence: victims are often unaware they are being victimized until they receive an anonymous message or a call from the police.
‘slave,’ ‘toilet,’ ‘rag’
For one 30-year-old deepfake victim, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy, the attack began in 2021 with an anonymous message on Telegram that said: “Hi!”
Over the next few hours, a stream of obscene and deepfake images and video clips followed, featuring her face, taken from a family trip photo she posted on social media. Words like “slave”, “toilet” and “rag” were written on the body.
In April, she learned from the police that two of her former classmates at Seoul National University had been detained. Male graduates of prestigious universities, along with colleagues, targeted a number of women, including a dozen former Seoul National students, with deepfake pornography. One of the detained men was sentenced to five years in prison last month
“I can’t think of any reason they treated me like that, other than because I was a woman,” she said. “The fact that I was surrounded by people like him made me lose my faith in fellow human beings.”
She says she is struggling with trauma after the attack. Her heart races every time she gets a message notification or an anonymous call on her smartphone.
South Korea, whose pop culture is exported around the world, has become the country most vulnerable to deepfake pornography, with singers and actresses accounting for 53 percent of those victimized by it. “2023 State of DeepFax,” A study published by US-based cyber security firm Security Hero. Leading K-pop agencies have declared war on DeepFax, saying they are gathering evidence and threatening lawsuits against their producers and distributors.
However, the problem is getting worse. South Korean police reported 297 cases of deepfake sex crimes between January and July, up from 156 in all of 2021, when such data was first collected.
Last month, when local news media exposed widespread deepfax traffic on Telegram, President Eun Suk Yeol ordered his government to “root them out.” Mr. Yoon’s critics noted that during his 2022 presidential campaign, he denied there was structural gender-based discrimination in South Korea and promised to abolish its Ministry of Gender Equality.
Increased news coverage of deepfakes this year has sparked panic among young women, many of whom have deleted selfies and other personal images from their social media accounts, fearing they could be used to deepfake. Chung Jin-kwon, who was a middle-school principal before taking a role at the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education last month, said his former school debated whether to omit student photos from yearbooks.
“Some teachers had already refused to have their photos there, replacing them with caricatures,” Mr Chung said.
Young people in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries, become tech-savvy from a young age. But critics say its school system focuses too much on preparing them for the all-important College Entrance Exams Nor are they taught to handle new technology ethically.
“We manufacture exam-problem-solving machines,” Mr. Chung said. “They don’t learn values.”
Push for tougher laws
Kim Ji-hyun, a Seoul city official whose team has counseled 200 teenagers caught up in digital sexual exploitation since 2019, said some boys used deepfakes to get revenge on ex-girlfriends — and in some cases, girls. To ostracize classmates. But many young people were first drawn to deepfakes out of curiosity, Ms. Kim said.
Chat room operators enticed them with incentives, including Starbucks coupons, and asked them to provide photos and personal data of women they knew. Some Telegram channels, called “rape and humiliation rooms,” target individuals or women from certain schools, said Park Seong-hye, a team leader at Korea’s government-funded Women’s Human Rights Organization, which has researched digital sex. Crimes have been investigated. and helped the victims.
Under a law enacted in 2020, people found guilty of making sexually explicit or offensive deepfakes with the intent to distribute them can be jailed for up to five years. Those who seek to profit financially from the distribution of such material could face up to seven years. But there is no law against buying, storing or viewing deepfakes.
Investigators must have court approval to go undercover to access Deepfake chat rooms, and they can only do so to investigate reports that minors have been sexually abused. The process can also be slow.
“You can find chat rooms on holiday, but by the time you get court approval, it’s over,” said Haem Young-ok, a senior investigator for online crimes at the National Police Agency.
The government has promised to introduce tougher laws against buying or viewing sexually exploitative deepfakes. This month, police investigating the latest wave of deepfakes said they had Seven male suspects were detainedSix of them are teenagers.
Pornography is censored on the South Korean internet, but people can get around restrictions using virtual private networks, and bans on social media channels are difficult to enforce. This has been shown by the police They can check if there is a telegram Deepfake encouraged sex crimes. Last month, Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France and charged with a range of crimes, including enabling the distribution of child sexual exploitation material.
Telegram said in a statement that it is “actively removing content reported from Korea that violates its terms of service and will continue to do so.”
Meanwhile, the government is being pressured to force online platforms to filter content such as deepfake pornography.
“It’s time to choose between protecting the platform and protecting our children and teenagers,” said Lee Soo-jung, professor of forensic psychology at Kyonggi University. “What we’re seeing now in 2024 was predicted back in 2020, but we haven’t done anything in between.”
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