The BBC has found that naked images of women being harassed, embarrassed and extorted are being shared on a large scale in the Telegram messaging service .
Warning: This article contains sexual content
As soon as Sarah realized that a nude photo of her had been leaked and shared on Telegram, her life changed. His Instagram and Facebook profiles were also added and his phone number was published. Suddenly, unknown men called her and asked for more photos.
“They made me feel like a prostitute because [they believed] that I shared my nude pictures. That means I had no value as a woman,” she said.
Sarah, whose real name is not, shared her photo with someone, but the photo eventually reached a group of 18,000 followers, many of whom were in her neighborhood in Havana, Cuba. He now fears that strangers on the street may have seen him naked. “I did not want to go out, I did not want to have any contact with my friends. I really suffered a lot.”
Sarah did not leave the house after her photos were shared on Telegram
He is not alone. After months of researching the Telegram, we found large groups and channels that shared thousands of secretly filmed, stolen, or exposed images of women in at least 20 countries. And there are not many signs that Telegram is looking to solve this problem.
Thousands of miles away from Cuba, Negar has to adapt to a new life.
He is from the Republic of Azerbaijan, but says he was forced to leave his homeland. In 2021, a video of her having sex with her husband was sent to her family and then published in a telegram group.
“My mother burst into tears and told me, ‘They sent me a movie.’ I was reduced to rubble,” he said.
This video was shared by a group of 40,000 people. In this film, the face of Negar’s ex-wife is blurred, but the face of the painter is clearly visible.
He thinks that his ex-wife secretly filmed him in order to extort money from his brother, who is a prominent critic of the President of Azerbaijan.
Negar says he was forced to leave his country
“They look at you as if they are a disgrace. It does not matter to anyone that you are married,” says Negar.
Negar says he had an argument with his ex-wife about the video, but he denied making the video. We tried to ask him for an explanation but he did not answer.
Negar is still struggling to get through this story. “I can not stand up. I go to the therapist twice a week. They say no progress has been made. They ask if I can forget about it, and I say no.”
Negar and Sara’s pictures were reported to Telegram, but they did not respond. This experience is absolutely no exception.
The BBC monitors 18 channels and 24 telegram groups in various countries from Russia to Brazil and from Kenya to Malaysia. The total number of subscribers is close to 2 million.
Personal information such as home address and parental phone number is posted next to nude pictures.
We have seen group executives ask members to send nude pictures of ex-spouses, co-workers, or classmates to an automated account so that they can be published without revealing the sender.
Telegram now says it has more than half a billion active users worldwide – more than Twitter – which has attracted many because of Telegram’s emphasis on privacy.
Millions of people went to Telegram in January 2021 from WhatsApp, which had changed its privacy policy.
Telegram has long been popular with pro-democracy protesters in media-censored countries. Users can publish content without sharing their name or phone number, create public or private groups of up to 200,000 members, or create channels that broadcast to an unlimited number of people.
Despite Telegram’s reputation for privacy, the only “secret chat” option is universal encryption, ensuring that only the two people you are talking to can see the message. Global encryption is the default setting in secure chat applications such as Signal and WhatsApp.
The platform also attracts users who seek less controlled space, including those who are denied access to other platforms.
“According to Telegram and its owner, they do not want to censor users,” said Natalia Krapieva, a technology legal adviser at AccessNow Digital Law Group.
But our research shows that this moderate approach to content monitoring has made the telegram a safe place to expose and share nude images.
Telegram does not adhere to a specific policy that allows naked images to be shared without the consent of individuals, but its terms of service compel users to agree to “illegal pornographic content on channels, bats and other publicly visible channels”. Are not to publish. “
Telegram also has the ability to report in-app in public and private groups and channels through which users can report pornography.
To test how strictly Telegram enforces its policies, we found 100 pornographic images and reported them through in-app reporting. A month later, 96 images remained available. We could not find the other four images because those images were in groups that we no longer had access to.
It was very worrying that while we were looking at these groups, an account from Russia also tried to sell us folders containing child abuse videos for less than the price of a cup of coffee. We reported the matter to the Telegram and the London Police, but after two months the post and the channel were still in place. This account was deleted only when we contacted the Telegram media team.
Despite its moderate oversight, Telegram is taking action against some content.
Telegram took a more proactive stance on child abuse images after Apple briefly removed Telegram from its app store because of videos like the one we were offered.
The platform also partnered with Europol, the European Union’s criminal investigation body, in 2019 to remove large amounts of ISIL-related content reproduced on the platform.
“We know Telegram can and does remove content related to terrorists or some very extremist political content,” said Dr. Aliaksander Hrasimenka, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
But deleting nude images does not seem to be a priority.
Members of far-right groups have moved to Telegram
We spoke with five Telegram content managers on condition of anonymity. We were told that they receive user reports through an automated system, which they say categorizes reports into “spam” and “non-spam.”
They said they were not actively looking for nude images and, as far as they knew, the telegram was not using artificial intelligence to do so. This lack of reaction has led some women to take action themselves.
Joanna found a nude photo of herself at the age of 13 in a notorious telegram group in Malaysia.
He created a fake telegram profile to join the group, where he anonymously searched for nude pictures and reported them. He also shared his findings with his friends.
Amid intense media pressure, the group eventually closed. But during our research, we found at least two duplicate groups that shared similar images.
Joanna reported images that were shared without consent on Telegram
“Sometimes you feel very helpless, because we tried so hard to eliminate these groups. But they are still building them. To be honest, I do not know if this is the end of the story,” says Joanna.
Telegram declined to interview us, but in a statement told us that it actively monitors public spaces and processes user reports of content that violates its terms of service.
Telegram did not confirm whether the publication of nude images of people on the platform is free or deleted without their consent.
The publication of advertisements on some public channels in the Telegram – along with the investment – has shown that Pavel Durov, the founder of the platform, intends to make money from it.
This is likely to increase pressure on Telegram and its authoritarian founder to become more in line with social media rivals such as WhatsApp, which has begun implementing policies against the sharing of nude images.
It remains to be seen how long the company will continue to resist more content control as it enters newer markets and begins generating revenue.
For women whose reputations have been tarnished and whose lives have been damaged by the sharing of their nude images on Telegram, this change is still too late whenever it happens.
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