The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov not only has a Russian or Western dimension, but a South Korean one as well, which will influence the future fate of both the messenger and its owner.
According to a third version, the situation is even more interesting. In South Korea, the internet is generally ‘passport-based’; in order to register on forums or be active, registration with an identity card is required. Formally, this was done to combat trolling, bullying, etc., however, the national intelligence service thus has the ability to track anti-government statements. Therefore, the ones seeking freedom of speech in the Republic of Korea are searching for sites that are not under domestic jurisdiction.
The situation was further aggravated by the scandalous discovery that the most common messenger in ROK (KakaoTalk) is read through by special services. After that, Koreans began to switch to Telegram, which was perceived as a territory of freedom because of the policy of its administrators. Indeed, Telegram has shown that it is such after a whole series of high-profile cases, the defendants of which got off lightly exclusively because of the messenger administration’s policy.
In the author’s opinion, the most famous case concerns the blogger ‘Druking’. This was the scandal when a group of bloggers associated with President Moon’s inner circle manipulated (through former Governor Kim Kyung-soo) public opinion by meddling with comments, using bots and spreading rumours. According to information the author has from informal sources, fake news was created and inserted in the same way, which brought outraged people to the street on the eve of the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. However, we most likely will not know the truth anymore. All negotiations took place in secret Telegram chats and when the investigation demanded to show the logs, the administration simply destroyed them, as a result of which nothing could be proved.
Another high-profile case that Telegram was involved in was the so-called ‘Nth room’ case related to a series of chats where people exchanged child pornography. It was a very loud story and a big problem for the investigation was, of course, to uncover the real authors behind the messages in the messenger. But this was achieved by operational actions and the use of ‘white hackers’, not by cooperation with the Telegram administration, which, having received word that terrible things were happening in a particular chat, simply destroyed the chat along with all messages and user lists so that it could not be used as evidence.
Of course, thanks to such a policy, Telegram was perceived as a territory of freedom, a place where people can truly be free from Big Brother (i.e. the state), protecting their right to freedom of thought. Scandals like the ‘Nth room’ case, however, did not cease and the problem was especially visible in the public eye because of the widespread use of so-called deepfakes in Korea (a deepfake is the realistic substitution of photo, audio and video materials created with the help of artificial intelligence).
Within Telegram, there was a whole network of chat rooms where it was possible to turn a photo of a person into a nude, erotic one. This kind of criminal activity has increased significantly, just as the number of subscribers to Telegram has, and the ROK authorities took advantage of the incident in France.
President Yoon Seok-yeol spoke about the problem of the spread of pornographic deepfakes without referencing Telegram directly.
On September 2, 2024, ROK media reported that the South Korean police had launched a preliminary investigation into Telegram on suspicion of inciting sexual crimes committed using deepfake technology. Wu Jong-soo, head of the National Office of Investigation, said that “like France, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Department has launched an internal investigation into Telegram’s legal entity”. The investigation is difficult because Telegram does not provide data about accounts distributing videos with deepfakes, but South Korea “has its own methods”. It was noted that the ROK police is considering the possibility of cooperating with the French authorities and other international organisations to obtain evidence for the ongoing investigation.
Yonhap notes that the investigation concerns eight bots generating fake materials of a sexual nature, as well as channels distributing these images. From August 26-29, the police received 88 complaints and identified 24 suspects.
After that, the administration of the messenger began to cave gradually. At first, Telegram stated that moderation on the platform meets standards, the messenger team complies with EU laws and it is absurd to blame the founder of the platform for user abuse. Moreover, against the background of the scandal, the number of new Telegram messenger users in ROK increased by a record 311,000 people. The total number of active users reached 3.47 million.
But on September 3, the Korean Communications Standards Commission reported that Telegram’s administration had satisfied Seoul’s demand to immediately remove deepfake content of a sexual nature. Representatives of the messenger in East Asia apologised to the South Korean authorities, expressing hope for building a trusting relationship and willingness to make Telegram safe for users. At the request of the commission, 25 videos were deleted.
On September 6, 2024, Telegram updated its policy, allowing users to inform moderators about ‘illegal content’ in private groups – this can be verified by the FAQ section on the messenger’s website. According to a cached copy of the page, earlier it said that ‘all Telegram chats and group chats are private’ (except for channels and bots) and the administration of the messenger ‘does not process any requests related to them’. Now, this section says that ‘all Telegram apps have ‘complain’ buttons that will allow you to report illegal content to moderators in just a few clicks’.
On the same day, Telegram founder Pavel Durov himself made a promise in his Telegram channel to improve the moderation of the platform. “This year we intend for Telegram moderation to go from criticism to praise”.
On September 29, the Korean Communications Standards Commission noted significant progress in its negotiations with Telegram. According to industry sources, Telegram offered to remove all illegal content immediately, including those related to fakes, drugs and gambling and also recognised the need for cooperation with the South Korean police and other agencies.
Now the question is to what extent the secret services of the whole world, one by one, will get access to chats. It is clear that this will likely not be instantaneous and that such requests will probably be accompanied by bureaucratic procedures designed to convince the administration of the messenger that this time it really is necessary to sacrifice freedom for the sake of security, but soon we will see attempts to ‘look for a different territory of freedom’ in other messengers or social networks.
Konstantin Asmolov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Leading research fellow at the Centre for Korean Studies, part of the China and Modern Asia Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
