South Korea's Porn Deepfake Crisis - by Inès N'Cib
TW: disturbing content, sexual abuse
“Pleas[e] help us. We are Korean students. No woman is safe in Korea.” [Modification by me. Find the original tweet on https://x.com/WomenLeisure/status/1828034029653840363] Late August 2024, this message was shared on Twitter by user @WomenLeisure. Like them, several accounts from South Korea have used the social media in order to alert the rest of the world to the dreadful issue that plagues their country: the New Nth Room scandal.
The scandal refers to a sprawling web of Telegram chat rooms, some with more than 200.000 members, dedicated to sharing AI generated pornographic images of unsuspecting women. The way the chat rooms work is quite simple and methodical: A person wishing to be added to a room first needs to send a certain number of pictures of a woman or girl they know. A quick scroll through her Instagram account usually gets them what they need. In addition to the pictures, they have to share her personal information, such as the school she goes to, her first and last name, her phone number… Finally, the group will use an artificial intelligence software to generate deepfake pornographic images with that woman’s face on it. The same process is repeated with as many women as they can think of. The targets are usually classmates, teachers or even family members.
The chat rooms were recently discovered by journalist Ms Ko. It appears they tend to be organised by school, ranging from middle schools to universities. More than 500 of them have been identified, although the actual number remains unknown. Even if a chat room is deleted, a new one will easily emerge.
This scandal has been titled the “New Nth Room” deepfake scandal in reference to the first Nth Room scandal. In 2019, Telegram's chat rooms blackmailing women into sharing sexually explicit pictures were discovered. The leader of the sex ring was sentenced to 42 years of jail time.
A deep sense of fear has overtaken the women of South Korea ever since the deepfake chat rooms were discovered. A lot of them have decided to erase all of their pictures from the internet, going as far as disabling all their social media accounts. Each of them is terrified of becoming a target for the men in their lives. They also lack faith in their government in its ability to protect them. Although current President Yoon Suk Yeol has pledged to “eradicate” the “digital sex crimes”, South Korean women doubt him for his anti-feminist positions and his disbelief in structural sexism.
Indeed, gender inequality is an acute issue in South Korea. In 2022, its gender pay gap was the worst one out of all the countries of the OECD. At the same time, anti-feminist ideology is gaining more and more importance, especially in online spaces where men decry feminism as a form of discrimination against them. The fact that most of the suspected perpetrators of the chat rooms are teenage boys further illustrate the severe lack of proper education for men when it comes to women’s rights.
In the meantime, South Korean women have taken to the street to protest against the country’s culture of misogyny and the sexual exploitation of women. On September 21st 2024, an estimated 6.000 women gathered at Hyehwa Station in Seoul to call for the punishment of the perpetrators and users of the deepfake chat rooms.
by Inès N'Cib
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