Park Jihyun, who, as a young student journalist, uncovered the Nth room sex-ring back in 2019, has since become a political advocate for victims of digital sex crimes. She said that since the deepfake scandal broke, pupils and parents had been calling her several times a day crying.
“They have seen their school on the list shared on social media and are terrified.”
Ms Park has been leading calls for the government to regulate or even ban the app in South Korea. “If these tech companies will not cooperate with law enforcement agencies, then the state must regulate them to protect its citizens,” she said.
Before this latest crisis exploded, South Korea’s Advocacy Centre for Online Sexual Abuse victims (ACOSAV) was already noticing a sharp uptick in the number of underage victims of deepfake pornography.
In 2023 they counselled 86 teenage victims. That jumped to 238 in just the first eight months of this year. In the past week alone, another 64 teen victims have come forward.
One of the centre’s leaders, Park Seonghye, said over the past week her staff had been inundated with calls and were working around the clock. “It’s been a full scale emergency for us, like a wartime situation,” she said.
“With the latest deepfake technology there is now so much more footage than there used to be, and we’re worried it’s only going to increase.”
As well as counselling victims, the centre tracks down harmful content and works with online platforms to have it taken down. Ms Park said there had been some instances where Telegram had removed content at their request. “So it’s not impossible,” she noted.
In a statement, Telegram told the BBC that its moderators “proactively monitor public parts of the app, use AI tools and accept user reports in order to remove millions of pieces of content each day that breach Telegram’s terms of service”.
While women’s rights organisations accept that new AI technology is making it easier to exploit victims, they argue this is just the latest form of misogyny to play out online in South Korea.
First women were subjected to waves of verbal abuse online. Then came the spy cam epidemic, where they were secretly filmed using public toilets and changing rooms.
“The root cause of this is structural sexism and the solution is gender equality,” read a statement signed by 84 women’s groups.
This is a direct criticism of the country’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has denied the existence of structural sexism, cut funding to victim support groups and is abolishing the government’s gender equality ministry.