What’s changing in Telegram?

The company is taking an important step to reduce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by partnering with the International Watch Foundation (IWF). This incident comes four months after the arrest of founder and CEO Pavlo Durov, 24 Channel reported, citing the IWF announcement.

Durov’s company has previously refused to cooperate with these and similar structures that detect and stop child abuse, drug trafficking, weapons and other illegal items. But the prospect of being behind bars has a miraculous effect on the director and his brother, the co-founder of the messenger who was previously wanted by France.

We will remind you in August French authorities indicted Durov on 12 chargesincluding “distribution, presentation or provision of pornographic images of minors by an organized group” and “possession of pornographic images of minors.”

The UK-based IWF is working with social media platforms, technology companies, governments and other similar organizations around the world to prevent the spread of CSAM. Telegram’s IWF membership gives the service access to effective tools that block links to illegal content, including AI-generated content. The agency will also provide Telegram with hashes of CSAM content (specific electronic fingerprints that can be used to identify desired content) and any malicious content that IWF detects. Telegram reportedly found “thousands of confirmed CSAM cases” since 2022 to which the company has failed to respond. Now it will finally delete all these materials.

Interestingly, Telegram’s head of press and media relations, Remy Vaughn, previously claimed that the platform “removes hundreds of thousands of child abuse material every month” using user reports, AI moderation, hashing, and more. But clearly this was not enough. Now Vaughn says IWF’s support will strengthen the company’s ability to remove CSAMs without anyone noticing.

Following Durov’s arrest, Telegram took further steps, announcing in September that it would hand over criminals’ IP addresses and phone numbers to legitimate police requests.