Messaging app Telegram will team up with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to deploy new tools to stop the spread of child sexual abuse images, the UK-based charity said on Wednesday.
The social media platform, which claims more than 950 million active users per month, will use IWF’s tools and data to “detect, disrupt, remove and block child sexual exploitation imagery,” the charity said. .
The move comes after Telegram’s Russian-born founder and chief executive Pavel Durov was arrested at Paris airport in August and later charged with multiple counts of failing to curb extremist and terrorist content on the app.
Prosecutors also claimed that the platform failed to take action against child sexual abuse imagery. Durov, who was released on five million euro ($5.6 million) bail, later announced a crackdown on illegal content.
The IWF previously said it had found thousands of examples of child sexual abuse images on Telegram since 2022.
The charity is a global leader in tracking and reporting images and videos of abuse, one of the few non-law enforcement bodies worldwide with the legal power to search for such material.
The new initiative is expected to prevent the spread of illegal images on public parts of Telegram’s platform.
IWF interim CEO Derek Ray-Hill called the partnership “a transformational first step on a very long journey”.
“We look forward to seeing what further steps we can take together to create a world in which the spread of sexual exploitation material online is virtually impossible,” she said.
The app will now use IWF’s unique digital fingerprint of millions of known child sexual exploitation images and videos to detect when criminal content is being shared.
IWF will also report directly to Telegram if child sexual abuse images are discovered.
Remi Vaughn, head of press and media relations at Telegram, said the dataset and tools will “strengthen Telegram’s mechanisms to protect its public platform”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
