By Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) -Sexually exploitative images of Chinese women were shared in encrypted Telegram chat groups with hundreds of thousands of users, Chinese media reported, triggering widespread outrage online.
A Chinese-language Telegram chat group named “MaskPark tree hole forum” shared images of women secretly taken or filmed in locations, including public toilets, with more than 100,000 anonymous users in China and overseas, said Chinese state-run newspaper Southern Daily, which first reported the chat groups’ existence last week.
Some users posted private images of their current or ex-girlfriends and female family members, the report said, and that some footage of women secretly filmed using pinhole cameras in public spaces was being sold in the chat groups.
Hashtags related to the issue on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo gained more than 270 million views on Tuesday.
“It’s truly frightening how secret filming has infiltrated everyday life,” read one comment.
China has strict obscenity laws and regularly scrubs content deemed pornographic from its heavily-controlled domestic internet, so the scale of the image sharing has shocked many in China. People must use VPN software to access Telegram, which is blocked in China.
Other Telegram sub-forums targeting Chinese-speaking users with pornographic content had as many as 900,000 members, the Southern Daily said.
“My ex-boyfriend secretly took photos of me during sex, posted my private photos to the group without my permission and publicised my social media accounts,” a female victim who was not named told the newspaper.
She was alerted to the forum in May through an anonymous tip-off, adding that many of the chat group messages self-deleted and the images could not be saved or screenshotted due to the settings in the Telegram chat.
Chatroom users also sold everyday objects, such as incense holders, fitted with pinhole cameras to secretly film women, according to chat records published in the report.
“This has heightened the concerns of many women, as voyeuristic incidents seem to be ubiquitous,” said Huang Simin, a Chinese lawyer who specialises in sexual violence cases.
“I’ve noticed a general sense of powerlessness (women feel with regards to legal protections), a feeling that there’s no effective way to address such incidents.”
The main MaskPark forum has been taken down but some smaller sub-forums remain active on Telegram, the Southern Daily said.
“The sharing of non-consensual pornography is explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and is removed whenever discovered,” a Telegram spokesperson told Reuters.
“Moderators proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept reports in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day, including non-consensual pornography.”
SOUTH KOREA SCANDAL
Chinese social media commenters likened the incident to South Korea’s “Nth room” scandal, where operators of pay-to-view Telegram chatrooms blackmailed at least 74 women, including underage girls, into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves with tens of thousands of users.
The case sparked a national outcry in South Korea and the main ringleader was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2020.
“Compared to the ‘Nth room’ incident, the evil of MaskPark is even more normalised and diffuse. There is no single principal offender and users share images for ‘pleasure’ not profit,” read one Weibo post with more than 14,000 likes.
Chatroom users who posted images can be investigated under Chinese law for “producing, selling and disseminating obscene materials for profit” as well as “illegally using special equipment for eavesdropping and taking non-consensual photos,” said Huang.
But the offences of secret filming and photography carry relatively light punishments if the content is not deemed obscene, she added, with a fine of up to 500 yuan ($69.68) and 10 days’ administrative detention for serious cases.
It is also difficult for Chinese police to punish offenders over MaskPark because Telegram is encrypted and hosted overseas, said a Chinese legal researcher who requested anonymity for reasons of sensitivity.
“Criminal cases require a high evidence threshold, so disseminating intimate images often remains difficult to prosecute due to insufficient evidence,” they said.
“There are no specific regulations regarding the dissemination of intimate images of adult women.”
Both lawyers called for stronger government regulatory oversight of gender-based abuse on online platforms.
“I hope that China will develop criminal laws to regulate carrying out voyeurism and sexual violence through visual imagery in the future,” said Huang.
($1 = 7.1755 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Additional reporting by Tiffany Le; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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