South Korea faces deepfake porn ’emergency’

To build a “healthy media culture”, President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated.

“Although it is often dismissed as ‘just a prank,’ it is clearly a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity,” he said.

Korea’s media regulator is meeting on Wednesday to discuss how to tackle this latest crisis, but opponents of the government have questioned whether it is up to the job.

“I don’t believe this government, which dismisses structural gender discrimination as mere ‘personal disputes’, can effectively address these issues,” Bae Bok-joo, a women’s rights activist and a former member of the minor Justice Party, told the AFP news agency.

Before coming into office, President Yoon said South Korean women did not suffer from “systemic gender discrimination”, despite evidence to the contrary.

Women hold just 5.8% of the executive positions in South Korea’s publicly listed companies, and are paid on average a third less than South Korean men – giving the country the worst gender pay gap of any rich nation in the world.

To this can be added a pervasive culture of sexual harassment, fuelled by the booming tech industry, which has contributed to an explosion of digital sex crimes.

These have previously included cases of women being filmed by tiny hidden cameras, or “spycams”, as they used the toilet or undressed in changing rooms.