SEOUL: South Korea's president called today for an investigation into deepfake porn after media reports that Telegram chatrooms were sharing explicit images of minors at schools and universities sparked public outrage.

South Korea has the world's fastest average internet speeds but activists say it also has an acute epidemic of digital sex crimes, including spycams and revenge porn, with inadequate legislation to punish offenders.

A South Korean broadcaster reported last week that students at a university were running an illegal Telegram chatroom, sharing deepfake pornographic material of female colleagues, one of a slew of high-profile cases that has triggered public anger.

"Recently, deepfake videos targeting unspecified individuals have been rapidly spreading through social media," President Yoon Suk-yeol told a cabinet meeting, according to his office.

"Many victims are minors, and most perpetrators have also been identified as teenagers," he said.

Yoon called for authorities to "thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them completely".

Perpetrators reportedly used social media platforms such as Instagram to save or screen-capture photos of victims, which were then used to create deepfake pornographic materials.

"The biggest issue with online sexual abuse is that their deletion is extremely difficult. Victims often suffer without even being aware of it," Bae Bok-joo, a women's rights activist and a former member of the minor Justice Party, told AFP.

"I don't believe this government, which dismisses structural gender discrimination as mere 'personal disputes', can effectively address these issues."

Yoon won office in 2022 in part on a campaign pledge to abolish the Gender Equality Ministry, which his supporters said was an obsolete backwater of "radical feminism".

Before being elected to the top office, Yoon also claimed South Korean women did not suffer from "systemic gender discrimination", despite evidence to the contrary on the gender wage gap and female workforce participation.

The government needs to declare a "national emergency" over deepfake porn, said Park Ji-hyun, a women's rights activist and former interim leader of the main opposition Democratic Party.

"Deepfake sexual abuse materials can be created in just one minute, and anyone can enter the chatroom without any verification process," she wrote on social media platform X.

"Such incidents are occurring in middle schools, high schools and universities across the country," Park said, alleging there were hundreds of thousands of perpetrators of such abuse.

South Korea has successfully prosecuted perpetrators of online abuse.

The mastermind of a notorious online sex abuse ring, which lured and blackmailed at least 74 women, including teenagers, into sending degrading sexual imagery of themselves, was jailed for 42 years in jail in 2021.

  - AFP