by STEVE HAN | @steve_han
editor@charactermedia.com
South Korea’s most widely used mobile messenger operator, Daum Kakao, has been accused of allowing large amounts of child pornography to be shared on its social networking service, the police told Yonhap News Agency on Wednesday.
The Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency will summon Daum Kakao co-CEO Lee Sirgoo for questioning over allegations that the company failed to prevent users from freely exchanging child pornography on Kakao Group, a messaging app for groups of friends.
South Korean law obliges online service providers to monitor, identify and prevent child pornography on their networks. This marks the country’s first ever investigation of an online service provider’s chief on charges of violating laws on child pornography. Police has been questioning Lee, but only as a witness, since August on Daum Kakao’s failure to prevent users from sharing child pornography.
Prosecutors indicted a 20-year-old man, identified only by his last name Jeon, for allegedly distributing pornographic videos of children through several Kakao Group accounts from June to August. Jeon distributed the videos to more than 10,000 people, 80 percent of whom were teenagers. Some of the teen users also shared sexually explicit videos of themselves, a police official said.
Police arrested 15 teenagers who later created public groups on Kakao Group to share similar videos, but later released them under the condition that they seek therapy and psychiatric treatment.
Kakao Daum launched in October after a merger between Lee’s Kakao Corp. and South Korea’s second-largest Internet portal Daum.
Photo courtesy of The Korea Herald
