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Telegram Faces Fresh Probe In South Korea Over Deepfake Porn After Durov Charged In France

Posted on by darion

Topline

South Korean police on Monday announced a probe into the beleaguered messaging app Telegram for its alleged role in distributing AI-generated, deepfake pornography, according to news reports, just days after its billionaire co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov was charged in France with allowing criminality to thrive on the platform.

Key Facts

The Seoul National Police Agency launched a probe into Telegram last week, Woo Jong-soo, head of the National Office of Investigation, told reporters in a press briefing, according to Yonhap news agency and AFP.

Woo said the investigation comes amid concerns the encrypted messaging app is “abetting” the distribution of sexually explicit deepfake content online.

Sexually explicit deepfake content—AI-generated images or videos that often superimpose a real person’s face over a fake body or onto real pornographic material—often victimizes young women and girls and has become the subject of intense public outrage in South Korea.

“As France has done,” Woo said police have launched the investigation internally “before officially booking it,” according to Yonhap.

Woo said the investigation was launched after Durov’s arrest in Paris last month, adding that South Korean police plan to work with French and international authorities as Telegram has not readily collaborated with investigations in the past.

Forbes has reached out to Telegram for comment.

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News Peg

South Korean officials, including President Yoon Suk Yeol, have declared an “emergency” over soaring rates of digital sex crimes in the country. Much of this stems from a tidal wave of deepfake pornography, which overwhelmingly target young women and underaged girls, as well as revenge porn and content involving spycams. Such content is shared and distributed through various online platforms. Though Telegram is certainly not the only platform used by criminals, it has come under intense scrutiny for its hands-off approach to content moderation as regulators and police question whether it could and should be doing more to combat illegality. Concerns regarding Telegram extend beyond digital sex crimes and the platform has come under fire for a variety of problems including its use by terrorists and far-right extremists, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material and fraud. Durov was arrested in Paris last week and officials have charged him with complicity in an array of criminal activities, including offenses related to child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Durov has a net worth of $15.5 billion, making him the 121st richest person in the world. He moved to and now lives in Dubai after saying the United Arab Emirates offered a better environment in which to develop Telegram and his fortune, partly driven by the success of the messaging app, makes him the richest expat—and richest person overall—in the Middle East.

Surprising Fact

In July, Durov claimed to have fathered more than 100 children through sperm donations over the past 15 years. He has five other children he shares with two ex-girlfriends.

Big Number

950 million. That’s how many active users Telegram claims to have globally. This would mean the app, one of the top five most downloaded in the world, is regularly used by around one in every eight people around the world. This makes it one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, trailing Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Tencent’s WeChat, a giant in China, which have around 2 billion, 1 billion and 1.3 billion active users, respectively.

Further Reading

ForbesWho Is Pavel Durov? Telegram CEO Charged With Multiple Crimes In FranceBy Molly Bohannon
CNNA Russian Elon Musk with 100 biological children: Meet Pavel Durov | CNN Business