article from the english edition of the Hankyoreh, Sept 10 2024
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Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the chat app Telegram, who has been indicted without arrest for aiding and abetting the proliferation of child sexual abuse material on his platform, is trying to calm the storm by announcing the removal of various controversial features from Telegram. However, his response is getting slammed for its shallowness, as such wishy-washy measures cannot stop the barrage of illegal pornography proliferating on the platform.
On Friday, Durov posted on his X (formerly known as Twitter) account to say that Telegram has “removed the People Nearby feature,” as well as disabled “new media uploads to Telegraph, [Telegram’s] standalone blogging tool.”
“While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk,” Durov claimed.
While Telegram has agreed to delete two features that have been used for criminal purposes, these features are largely unrelated to the recent sex crimes involving deepfakes. The “people nearby” feature utilizes GPS technology to track your phone’s location and indicate other users in the area, allowing people to form chat rooms with people in their region.
Telegram logo. (Reuters/Yonhap)
This feature shares a user’s location data without their consent and places users at risk of stalking. Critics pointed out that it has often been used by bot programs to indiscriminately target people for financial scams. The Telegraph feature allows users to anonymously upload blog posts, photos and videos. Scammers would use this feature to create fake websites, share the links to the fake sites, and lure unsuspecting users into phishing scams that harvested their personal data. Yet neither of these features is directly related to the production and distribution of illicit deepfakes.
Experts say that simply removing one feature is not going to uproot digital sex crimes. Malicious users constantly create and discover ways to circumvent such controls or restrictions or simply migrate to more liberal platforms, where they can replicate their crimes.
Cho Gyeong-suk, an activist with IT feminist group Techfemi who identifies and reports bots that produce sexually exploitative deepfakes, explained the concept of bots sharing bots.
“If Telegram shuts down a specific bot, malicious users rapidly create a similar bot. Then they use a bot for sharing a link to that bot to repeat their crimes,” she said.
On Sept. 3, Cho discovered and reported a Telegram channel with 210,000 subscribers. Upon entering, the user is greeted with the message “We're always here. Come back to our new bot,” alongside a link to a new bot and instructions on how to use link-sharing bots in Korean, Japanese, German and French.
A message in a Telegram chat room on Sept. 3, 2024, informing readers of the address of a new deepfake sexual abuse material bot with messages in multiple languages. (courtesy of Cho Gyeong-suk)
It’s urgent to send a message to these malicious users that if they commit a crime, they will get caught.
“Telegram has agreed to cooperate with Korean authorities, but all they’ve done is share an email address,” said Park Ji-hyun, the former interim leader of the Democratic Party. Operating under a group codenamed Team Flame, Park helped expose the criminal activity of the notorious Nth Room channel.
“If the police or the KCSC [Korea Communications Standards Commission] have to find every individual video and which channel it’s in and report them all to an email address with an erasure request, it’s going to take too long for them to delete them. During that time, the videos are distributed through other channels,” Park added.
“When authorities receive a report about the distribution of illicit online sexual exploitation, an investigative body needs to be aggressively informed about the perpetrators’ IP addresses, online registration data and other identification data. We need to send a clear message to the perpetrators: You will get caught. That’s the only way they’ll stop,” she said.
“Rather than simply deleting specific features, Telegram needs to monitor its platform to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material or sexual content depicting minors and establish an ethical monitoring committee, like Google does. They need to discuss ways to find out what happens on their platform and to cooperate with the authorities,” said Won Eun-ji, the other half of Team Flame.
“We also need technological measures such as the automated deletion of content that shows signs of being illicit or sexually exploitative. There could also be preventative tools that prevent such content from being uploaded in the first place,” she added.
By Chung In-seon, staff reporter