MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th December, 2022) South Korean women and girls have been affected by Google's failure to promptly remove explicit content from the internet because the IT giant's reporting system was unable to deliver swift and transparent responses and videos of sexual abuse proliferated online, a prominent international human rights organization said on Thursday.
"As a wave of digital sex crimes in South Korea causes severe harm to the women and girls who have been targeted, Google's inadequate system for reporting non-consensual explicit content is making matters even worse," Director of Amnesty International Korea Jihyun Yoon said in a statement.
Yoon also said that Google should do more to prevent the spread of online gender-based violence - "not just in Korea, but everywhere."
"Survivors around the world are forced to use this same flawed reporting system when they try to get harmful content removed, so it is highly likely this issue extends way beyond Korea," Yoon added.
The watchdog said that while Google has promised to remove non-consensual explicit content on request, the procedure was "confusing and difficult to follow" because the request forms were difficult to find and contained "ambiguous categories about the type of content being reported."
"Google has a lot of advantages - you can easily get the information you want. But to the victims, Google is nothing more than a huge distribution website. It is the worst website in terms of secondary victimization," Hyun-jin, one of the 25 survivors and activists surveyed by Amnesty International, was quoted as saying.
In March 2020, a group of South Korean reporters revealed the existence of eight secret chat rooms, which operated on the Telegram messenger service and contained thousands of videos depicting explicit non-consensual sexual content, sold using cryptocurrency. The South Korean police said that over 60,000 people participated in crime by entering these chats. In 2021, the operator of one of these chat rooms was sentenced to 42 years' imprisonment.
