What is known

A popular messaging app You have never been a member of the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) or the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)The British equivalent of NCMEC. These organisations work with most online platforms to find, report and remove banned content.

While Telegram repeatedly insists that its moderation “meets industry standards and is constantly improving,” the company has been repeatedly accused of: ignores illegal contentand also enables numerous extortionist hackers, drug dealers, arms dealers, and other criminal elements to use their services.

NCMEC has repeatedly asked Telegram to join the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but requests ignoredMore than 1,600 Internet companies participate in the CyberTipline program, which is administered by NCMEC. For example, companies based in the U.S. are required to register. 16% of companies participating in the program are not American.

An IWF representative also noted that “despite proactively attempting to engage with Telegram over the past year, they are not members of IWF and do not use their services to disrupt, prevent or stop the distribution of child sexual abuse imagery.” Telegram, which is not a member of IWF or NCMEC, cannot proactively find, remove or block confirmed cases of child abuse that are added to and classified on lists compiled by charities.

IWF also noted that although the company removed CSAM after the material was approved, It does this extremely slowly and responds worse to daily demands..

It is worth noting that there is a platform. also not part of TakeItDownIt aims to eliminate so-called revenge porn. Snap, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Pornhub, and OnlyFans are all members of an association that uses something called hashlists to search for images and videos on their public or unencrypted platforms.

What about reporting?

Another rule that Telegram does not follow is this transparent reportingEvery six months, social networks publish a list of all content removed at the request of the police. Many other social networks, including Meta, Snapchat and TikTok, publish their reports online with a library of past periods covering years of activity.

Telegram doesn’t have such a site. The app itself has a separate bot called Transparency Reports, which should logically answer these kinds of questions. But when you open it, you only see one option: “Get report” for your country. The BBC writes that Telegram’s transparency channel didn’t respond to a request to view previous reports, saying “there are no reports for your region.” We tested a similar request for Ukraine, which gave a similar response: “There are no transparency reports for your region.”

Response to 24 Channel’s news request / 24 Channel Screenshot

Note that Telegram also describes its approach to transparency reporting as “six-monthly.”

Telegram also has an unusual system for media in general. The communication method provided by the company works through an automated bot in the app, and journalists on the publication received no response after “months of trying to get a response to various requests.”

What they say on Telegram

While the company has yet to comment on these specific allegations, Telegram has previously said that “the platform or its owner is responsible for abuses on this platform.”

In June, Pavlo Durov told journalist Tucker Carlson that he had hired only “about 30 engineers” to run his platform. It’s not known whether the company has a large enough team of moderators. Nor whether it even exists.