After arrest
Telegram deletes millions of groups and channels
18.12.2024Reading time: 2 min.
Telegram says it deleted 15 million groups and channels in 2024 – most of them shortly after the arrest of founder Pawel Durow.
The controversial chat service Telegram wanted to take more consistent action against criminal activities after the temporary arrest of its founder Pawel Durow last August. Among other things, more information should be shared with investigators than before.
The network has also published a so-called moderation overview, which shows how much harmful content the platform has deleted. Accordingly, Telegram removed more than 15 million groups and channels in 2024 that violated the service’s terms of use. According to Telegram, these include “calls for violence, the distribution of child abuse material and the trade in illegal goods.”
There is an anomaly in the moderation overview from last September, shortly after Durow’s arrest. Since then, the number of blockings of groups and channels on the platform has visibly increased – to up to 200,000 deletions per day.
After his arrest, Durov admitted that he had not done enough to delete problematic content on Telegram. He promised that the service wanted to get significantly better at moderating content – and promised that progress would be made soon. The goal must be for the network industry as a whole to become stronger and more secure, said the Telegram founder.
In addition, the platform will in future provide the investigating authorities with the telephone numbers and IP addresses of suspects upon official request, according to a revised version of the service’s data protection policy. Previously this was only intended for terrorist suspects.
Today it became known that thousands of people apparently found space for perfidious exchanges in Telegram groups. The German research team at STRG_F spent over a year investigating dozens of chat groups and uncovered sexual abuse.
In the groups, some of which have up to tens of thousands of members, users exchange instructions on how to secretly anesthetize people for sexual assault and rape, reports the “Tagesschau”. Read more about this here.