Indicted Kakao ex-CEO bows out after failing to stop flood of child porn

The former CEO of Kakao, maker of South Korea’s most popular mobile messenger KakaoTalk, is leaving the company after being mired in controversy about the lack of control over sexually explicit content being shared on its social networking service KakaoGroup.

Sirgoo Lee, who has served as an advisor since stepping down from the helm in August, will leave the company he joined in 2011 as of Saturday.

In an official statement provided to Tech in Asia, Kakao describes Sirgoo as “instrumental” to Kakao’s growth, and says he decided to leave “to pursue a new challenge.”

“He asked for faith in the leaders, and that all members of Kakao work together to create new opportunities and foster growth,” the statement reads. “All employees of Kakao extend our deepest gratitude for all his contribution.”

A Kakao spokesperson tells Tech in Asia that his indictment neither created internal tension nor was the reason for his departure. “He had been weighing his options and considering the decision prior to the indictment, and the timing is merely coincidental,” she says.

Earlier this month, Korean prosecutors indicted the 50-year-old without detention on charges of violating the country’s Youth Protection Act by allegedly failing to block the circulation of child pornography on KakaoGroup, an offshoot app of KakaoTalk that is designed for group messaging, while he was chief.

Sirgoo was first summoned for questioning over the issue last year after investigators discovered a ring of over 10,000 people, over 80 percent of them teenagers, in groups where sexually explicit videos of children were being distributed.

It was the first time that Korean prosecutors indicted the head of an online portal operator for violating the act, which requires online service providers to take proper actions to detect child pornography in its networks. The indictment also caused a debate in the local industry over whether technology services should be held accountable for monitoring users’ content.

Kakao fought back on the indictment by arguing that there was a lack of clear government guidelines on monitoring such materials, seeing as it is illegal to access privately shared content.

The company also said it had been taking all appropriate measures to ban the circulation of pornography on its services by blocking certain keywords.

Kakao co-founder and ex-CEO Sirgoo Lee

Sirgoo helped Kakao Corp. grow KakaoTalk into a ubiquitous app with 38 million monthly active users in Korea that spawned other services like a game store, a mobile payment system, and a taxi-hailing app. Its wild domestic success led to a massive US$10 billion merger with the country’s No. 2 search portal Daum last year to square against local tech giant Naver.