Telegram partners with child safety group to scan content for sexual abuse material
Before the arrest of Telegram’s CEO, the platform had a reputation for resisting outside pressure to moderate content.
Telegram, which for years has had a reputation as a platform used to trade child sexual abuse material, has for the first time agreed to partner with a larger international watch group to combat such content.
The U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a database of known abuse imagery and provides tools for tech platforms to automatically flag and remove it, announced a partnership with Telegram on Tuesday.
Telegram’s enigmatic co-founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, remains free on bail in France after he was arrested in August as part of a larger sweep that included allegations of the platform’s “complicity” in several illegal schemes, including distributing explicit images of the abuse of minors.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 23, 2016.Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg via Getty Images fileWith the new partnership, the IWF can effectively scan Telegram for exact matches of child sexual abuse material in its databases and automatically block it, the IWF said in a news release. Similar tools will also block links to sites known to host such content and identify artificial intelligence-created abuse imagery.
Before Durov was arrested, Telegram, based in Dubai, had a unique reputation as being overtly hostile to moderation and court orders from governments to either turn over information about users suspected of crimes or to follow orders to remove content.
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