Imagine a billionaire bought an island. As he allowed people to populate the island, it became clear that predators and pedophiles were flocking to it. In fact, the island was becoming a cesspool where criminals preyed on and tortured children in the most horrific ways.
The billionaire was well aware of this repugnant activity. But instead of striving to stop it, he set up systems to protect the criminals. He constructed private hideaways where they could continue abusing children in secret. He deliberately made it difficult for police to get to the island and investigate crimes.
What would our response be to this billionaire? How would we want our law enforcement and justice systems to handle him? Would we not cry out for him to be held accountable?
Well, a man very much like this billionaire was arrested this week.
His name is Pavel Durov. He is the CEO of Telegram.
What is Telegram?
Telegram is a messaging app that is increasingly referred to as “the new dark web.” Since its inception, Telegram has served as an epicenter of extremist activities, providing a thriving ecosystem for the most heinous of crimes—including sadistic torture and sextortion rings operated by pedophiles, networks for trading child sexual abuse material (CSAM, the more apt term for “child pornography”), sex trafficking of children and adults alike, communities for the non-consensual creation and distribution of sexually explicit images (i.e. image-based sexual abuse), selling of “date rape” drugs, and so much more.
To give just one horrific example:
[STRONG TRIGGER WARNING]
In September 2023, the FBI issued a warning about a satanic pedophilic cult using Telegram as its main source of communication. This cult regularly extorted children as young as 8 years old into filming themselves committing suicide or self-harm, sexually abusing their siblings, torturing animals, or even murdering others. Members of the Telegram group would control their victims by threatening to share sexually explicit images of the children with their family and friends, or post the images online. Many members had the final goal of coercing the children to die by suicide on live-stream.
Telegram users would gain access to this group by sharing videos of the children they extorted, or videos of adults sexually abusing children.
Hundreds of children were victimized by this group, especially LGBTQ+ children and racial minorities.
You can read more about the unthinkable abuse occurring on Telegram here.
Telegram Was Aware of Horrific Crimes, But Chose to Enable them
Telegram was undoubtedly aware of the extent of the crimes taking place on its platform. The app was banned in more than a dozen countries. Law enforcement agencies, nonprofit organizations, cybersecurity analysts, and investigative journalists have been sounding the alarm about Telegram for years.
Yet rather than taking much-needed steps to combat these crimes, Telegram provided a cover for them to continue unchecked. The truth is, Telegram’s very design seems built to invite and protect criminals and predators.
The company makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to investigate crimes occurring on the app. It uses end-to-end encryption in many areas of the platform—and for the areas not covered by end-to-end encryption, it uses distributed infrastructure. In Telegram’s own words, distributed infrastructure means that “data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions … As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.”
The Stanford Internet Observatory concluded in a June 2023 report that Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels. They concluded this because Telegram had no explicit policy against CSAM in private chats, no policy at all against grooming, no efforts to detect for known CSAM, and the researchers found CSAM being traded openly in public groups.
It is therefore no surprise that Telegram was noted as the #1 most popular messaging app used to “search for, view, and share CSAM” by almost half of CSAM offenders participating in a 2024 study.
These are only a couple examples of the many ways Telegram designed its platform to shelter criminals and allow abuse to proliferate. You can read more about this here.
Telegram CEO Arrested in France … Where is U.S. Department of Justice?
Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram was arrested in France this week, as part of an investigation into the myriad crimes on the platform.
The only question now is: Why is the United States Department of Justice not engaged?
Please join us in urging the DOJ to investigate Telegram now! Take 30 seconds to complete the quick action below.
