Pornography Crops Up On Yahoo Korea

Clips with pornographic content were posted twice on the internet portal site Yahoo Korea before being removed, prompting the police to begin an investigation.

All day on March 19, the clips were accessible to all internet users, giving rise to criticism and protests over the faulty monitoring system.

At 6:00 p.m. on March 18, Yahoo Korea’s multimedia service “Yammy” had two clips: a sex video and a woman urinating on its “popular video corner.”

The one and five-minute videos stayed up on the site for 6 hours and 10 minutes until 12:10 a.m. the next day, each video with 20,000 and 10,000 hits respectively, soon becoming the two most viewed videos on the site. Yahoo Korea belatedly deleted the two videos later.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Cyber Crime Investigation team received an internet IP address and other identification leads from Yahoo Korea on March 19, and is tracking down the culprit.

Authorized personnel reported, “There were different IP addresses for each video. We’re investigating to see if they are the same user.”

Yahoo Korea has temporarily disabled its User-Created Content (UCC) sites, and said they are examining the core problem of these services.

Due to the video incident, video service providers are being criticized for problems with their monitoring systems.

On UCC service-providing portal sites like Daum and Naver, there are tens of thousands of videos posted up daily. But there is only 50 to 200 monitoring staff to screen and remove inappropriate footage.

Also, the monitoring is done 24 hours a day, but there are limitations to what the staff can detect individually.

Unlike previous textual contents, it is especially difficult to apply filtering technology for video services. The two videos on Yahoo Korea did not use forbidden keywords and managed to avoid filtering.

Naver chief Lee Jong-ryul says, “It is hard to screen out all the pornographic videos posted by members completely, when there are more than hundreds of videos posted up daily by thousands of users. The users have to put effort into this, too, not just the companies.”

Experts emphasized that using this incident as a milestone, the administration systems of UCC services should be reinforced institutionally and culturally.