Amid the news that Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested for failing to moderate child abuse imagery on the app, a map showing large Telegram chatrooms in South Korea used by children and teens to produce and share deepfake child sexual abuse imagery went viral.
Telegram is a messaging service that allows for chatrooms and channels that can contain hundreds of thousands of users. Deepfake media are images and videos altered via artificial intelligence.
According to a website from the South Korea-based group Team Datastack, the problem is widespread. The group created an interactive map of the country showing the schools that chatroom participants attend. The map includes colleges and universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools.
The map comes in the wake of numerous reporrts about the widespread popularity of such chat rooms in South Korea.
As reported by Koreaboo, some of the victims of the deepfake imagery were targeted on KakaoTalk, a South Korean messenger service, where chatroom members stole their profile pictures and used them to make sexually explicit deepfakes. According to the site, over 500 schools have students involved in the groups.
After it was reported widely by South Korean media that sexually explicit images of women and children were housed in Telegram chatrooms based in the country, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said the proliferation of the images is “a clear criminal act.”
Now, the South Korean government has asked Telegram to curb the creation and spread of the images. However, given Telegram’s known reticence, it is unclear if the app will participate. The government also created a 24-hour hotline for victims of the violating deepfakes. Additionally, South Korean police will “aggressively” investigate those who create and share the images.
Since the deepfake map was created on Monday, it has gone viral on X and Reddit where many are sharing their somber reactions to the news that elementary students were affected by the vulgar chatrooms.
“If this isn’t an international disaster, then what is?” an X user said about all the hotspots on the map.
“Crazy how large scale this is, my heart really goes out to the victims,” a redditor wrote about the map. “I hope there will be justice for these women and that Korean men take accountability.”
Others said that the map is only one example of how prevalent deepfake child sexual abuse imagery is across the world. In its 2024 report on artificial intelligence being used to make the media, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation found that there has been a “gradual rise” in the creation of deepfake images and video.
“I can guarantee that something similar is already occurring in some capacity everywhere,” a redditor said.
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