Report from The Guardian
In Brief – Ofcom, the UK online content moderation regulator under the Online Safety Act (OSA), has announced that it is investigating whether Telegram has failed to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The probe follows evidence from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection indicating that illegal material may be circulating on the platform. The investigation comes amid broader concerns about abusive adult content on the app, including reports identifying 150 Telegram channels globally where AI-generated deep-fake images were created and distributed. Ofcom has set combating child sexual exploitation as a top OSA enforcement priority. Telegram denied the allegations, stating it has largely eliminated public CSAM distribution through detection technology and partnerships with NGOs, and suggested the investigation may reflect broader pressure on privacy-focused platforms.
Context – Ofcom has made child protection a top regulatory priority of the Online Safety Act, releasing special rules for “risky” online sites likely to be used by young people, including social media platforms, search engines, and gaming sites, directing them to implement “highly effective” age checks and to identify users under age 18, tailor recommendation algorithms to filter out harmful material, and institute procedures to quickly remove dangerous content. Earlier this year, Ofcom opened an OSA investigation of xAI’s Grok image service in response to charges that it could be used to create non-consensual sexualized images. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a “regulatory cousin” of the OSA, is also being used to press large digital platforms on how they deal with threats to young people, including as part of investigations of TikTok, Meta and X. Telegram has not been the target of a DSA investigation by the EU Commission because the platform claims a user base of less than 45 million users in Europe, although EU parliamentarians have called on the Commission to bring the service into the VLOP tier of the DSA. In France, Telegram’s CEO is the subject of a criminal investigation of CSAM on the service.