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The platform’s CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France earlier this year for failing to stop criminal activity on the site.
Telegram, the messaging app heavily criticised for its hands-off approach to content moderation, has said that it blocked more than 15.5m groups and channels that violated its terms and services in 2024.
According to the platform, the blocked channels include those that incited violence, shared child abuse material and traded in illegal goods.
Content moderation on Telegram includes combining user reports with “proactive monitoring” powered by machine learning, the company said – an effort which was “further enhanced” earlier this year with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) moderation tools.
Moreover, Telegram said that since 2018, public images have been automatically checked against a child sexual abuse material (CSAM) database, leading to nearly 710,000 CSAM-related groups and channels on the platform being blocked this year, including more than 32,000 just this month.
Meanwhile, more than 130,000 terrorist-related communities were also blocked this year. Data provided by Telegram and Etidal, the Saudi Arabian non-profit organisation combating extremist ideology – which Telegram has partnered with since 2022 – showed that the platform removed nearly 130m extremist pieces of content and more than 14,500 extremist channels from the platform since February 2022.
Telegram’s daily transparency reports, which the platform has been publishing since 2016, showed that it banned more than 9,000 terrorist bots and channels just this month alone.
The organisation said that “calls to violence and terrorist propaganda have no place” on the platform. However, Pavel Durov, the platform’s CEO and co-founder was arrested this August by French authorities over claims that he failed to take steps towards stopping criminal activity on the messaging app. Although out on €5m bail, the case against him is still pending and he is forbidden from leaving France until March 2025.
The platform had initially pushed back against Durov’s arrest, saying that its CEO has “nothing to hide”. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” read a statement from the company published on the day of his arrest.
Since his arrest, however, the company updated its terms of service and privacy policy to “further deter criminals” from abusing the app. The app’s privacy policy now states that a user’s IP address and phone number may be shared with relevant authorities if the platform receives valid information that the user is a suspect in a case involving criminal activities.
Earlier this month, Telegram joined the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation, gaining access to the organisation’s datasets and technology to prevent CSAM on its platform. The Foundation’s interim CEO Derek Ray-Hill called this move a “transformational first step” for Telegram.
Although Telegram is removing millions of illegal pieces of material from its platform, a report published in October by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime revealed that criminal groups are active on Telegram forums openly, conducting illicit activities with little moderation. It also found that the platform has become an important tool for underground cryptocurrency exchanges, organised crime networks and online gambling rings.
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