Telegram founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on August 24th, 2024, directing fiery discourse and attention in South Korea to the multiple Telegram chat rooms labeled as “humiliation rooms” or “friends of friends rooms” with thousands of users circulating sexually explicit AI-generated images. With just an ID photo, deepfakes of minors and students are created and spread by family members and classmates. According to Hankyoreh, a Korean newspaper, one chatroom with over 2,340 members was specifically dedicated to deepfakes of middle and high school students. In addition to several other channels committed to spreading images of female university students, nurses, and teachers, Hankyoreh also confirmed the existence of a chatroom where members targeted their own sisters and mothers.
This is no isolated event. Spreading explicit images on Telegram has been a persistent and recurring issue. The recent deepfake chat rooms bear striking resemblance to the infamous Korean Telegram case dubbed the “Nth-Room,” where users blackmailed and manipulated female classmates and family members into making graphic pornagraphic material. Although the main leaders of the Nth-Room were apprehended and sentenced in 2020, Telegram continues to be a convergence of explicit material thanks to the surge of deepfakes and a lack of regulation laws surrounding AI and the platform.
Hankyoreh writes that after Korean users started flooding Telegram in 2014 and 2016, the platform has become “a cesspit for sex crimes.” Telegram utilizes an end-to-end encryption that makes it “impossible for anyone who is not the sender or recipient to decipher” messages. While the law “requires internet service providers…[to remove] sexually offensive material,” Telegram is exempt, as “chat rooms are strictly ‘private.’’’
Furthermore, the wider access to creating deepfakes has made it exceptionally easier for perpetrators to create illegal content of their victims. With mass advancements in technology and science, digital crimes have risen in both severity and frequency. Laws around such crimes are relics from a time where such technology did not exist, and are not enough now. South Korea’s Advocacy Centre for Online Sexual Abuse Victims, BBC reports, had already noticed a “sharp uptake” in the number of underage victims to deepfakes in 2023, when 86 victims receiving counselling jumped to 238 in eight months, with 64 more victims coming out in just one week.
Beyond a lack of regulation, some critics argue that the root cause of the recent South Korean deepfake crisis is heavily entangled with objectification of women and misogyny. A gender war has long raged in South Korea, highlighted by the uproar against hidden sex cameras and taping inside public bathrooms in 2017. In an interview, Chang Dahye, a research fellow at the Korean institute of Criminology and Justice, told NPR, “It’s a form of expressing misogyny and anger toward women. By mocking and belittling women, they [the perpetrators] get affirmation from each other.” Dahye’s statement encapsulates the heavily targeted nature of the crisis, as, according to NPR, an “overwhelming” majority of the victims are women.
The trial of Pavel Durov will aim to bring to light, and bring him to justice for the history of sex crimes on his platform in Korea and across the globe.
