[The Editors' Verdict] The War Against Deepfake Crime

Korea Most Vulnerable to Deepfake Porn
Most Sexual Crime Platforms Are Telegram
Obligation to Delete Illegal Content Must Be Imposed

A few days ago, my middle school daughter couldn’t put down her phone even during meals and was busy scrolling, so I asked her what she was doing. With a slightly raised tone, she showed me her phone and said she was taking down all the photos of herself and her friends that she had posted on her social networking service (SNS). She also showed me a list called the so-called ‘Tollin School.’ She said she was scared because there were rumors that even if the photos were set to private, they were hacked, reproduced as deepfakes, and distributed in Telegram chat rooms.

In the past, deepfake sex crimes mainly targeted female celebrities such as singers and actresses. However, now deepfake videos are appearing not only of neighbors around us but even of minor family members. With advancements in technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), anyone can easily create deepfake videos, meaning anyone can become a victim of deepfake. From the perspective of parents with children, this is chilling.

In fact, there is even a report from an overseas security company stating that South Korea is the most vulnerable country in the world to deepfake pornographic content. According to the ‘2023 Deepfake Production Status’ report recently released by the U.S. cybersecurity company Security Hero, an analysis of 95,820 videos uploaded between July and August last year on 10 deepfake porn sites and 85 channels on video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion showed that 53% of the people appearing in deepfake productions were South Korean nationals, the highest proportion. Notably, 8 out of the top 10 individuals most frequently used in deepfake porn productions worldwide were Korean. The report pointed out, “South Korea is the biggest target country for deepfake pornographic content,” adding, “It is especially vulnerable to explicit deepfake productions.”

Following the 2019 ‘Nth Room’ incident, the most recent so-called ‘Acquaintance Humiliation Room’ cases mostly involved social media platforms, primarily Telegram. In particular, in May, there was an incident where Seoul National University graduates created illegal composite images using photos of dozens of women, including female alumni, and distributed them on Telegram. This case, known as the ‘Seoul National University Nth Room,’ had over 60 female victims.

Crimes caused by deepfakes are not limited to South Korea. Ultimately, French authorities arrested and indicted Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, last week for allowing the platform to become a major distribution channel for digital sex crime videos. He was charged with ignoring requests for cooperation from the French judiciary and failing to prevent illegal activities by platform users. Telegram has never responded to requests for cooperation in sex crime investigations from the South Korean government. French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized, “In a rule-of-law country, freedom is protected within legal frameworks both on social media and in real life.”

In the United States, ahead of the presidential election, the sophisticated image generation capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to spread fake photos, fueling election confusion. Fake photos manipulated to show U.S. pop star Taylor Swift and her fans supporting Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump are circulating, and similarly, photos of dozens of beautiful women in bikinis have been stolen and used on fake SNS accounts.

In the dictionary sense, ‘fact’ refers to ‘something that actually happened,’ and ‘truth’ means ‘a fact without falsehood.’ However, now it has become very easy and inexpensive to create ‘facts’?words and actions that one did not actually say or do. If facts disappear, truth collapses as well. This is why calls for imposing deletion obligations on platforms for illegal content and strengthening their responsibilities are inevitably growing louder.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.