“Deepfake porn”: Telegram to cooperate with South Korea

The Telegram messaging service has agreed to collaborate with the South Korean authorities in the investigation into the wave of distribution of fake pornographic content which is plaguing the country, the South Korean telecommunications regulator announced on Monday.

In August, authorities discovered a gigantic network of Telegram channels, often created from schools or universities, in which users shared “deepfake porn”, montages generated with artificial intelligence in which the faces of individuals are plastered on photos or in sexual videos.

The creators of this illegal content often took photos of their victims from social networks. According to the police, most of the victims are women, 60% of whom are minors.

The South Korean police, whose requests for cooperation were initially ignored by Telegram, opened an investigation at the end of August against the messaging service for “encouraging these crimes”.

“A social problem”

It said Monday that it had received hundreds of complaints about “deepfakes” and arrested a total of 387 suspects.

Finally, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) met last week with representatives from Telegram.

The messaging service claimed to “fully understand the situation in Korea where sexual deepfake crimes have become a social problem” and pledged to apply a zero-tolerance policy, the KCSC said on Monday.

In one month, the Commission asked Telegram to delete 148 deepfake videos, the messaging service complied “and immediately sent us the results,” KCSC President Ryu Hee-lim told reporters.

For their part, the South Korean police indicated that they had also started communicating with Telegram on Monday, after having been ignored for a long time.

“There is progress in communications”

“There is progress in communications,” senior police official Woo Jong-soo told reporters.

Founded in 2013, Telegram was committed since its beginnings to never revealing information about its users, and had a reputation for being recalcitrant to any cooperation with the police or justice.

It began to change its attitude after the arrest and indictment in France of its founder and boss, Pavel Durov, in particular for “refusal to communicate the information necessary for interceptions authorized by law” and for complicity in crimes and organized crimes via the platform.

At the beginning of September, Mr. Durov promised to make moderation on Telegram “a source of pride”.

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