Telegram quietly updates website to allow abuse reports following founder's arrest
Telegram has updated its website to explicitly allow users to report private chats to its moderators, the company said in its FAQ page, as it updated some of its other privacy features following the arrest of founder Pavel Durov in France last month over "crimes committed by third parties" on the platform.
The messaging app, which serves nearly one billion monthly active users and more than 10 million subscribers, has long maintained a reputation for minimal supervision of user interactions. The earlier language on the FAQ page said the private chats were protected from moderation requests. "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them," the FAQ page earlier started.
On Thursday night, Telegram revised the FAQ page. "All Telegram apps have 'Report' buttons that let you flag illegal content for our moderators — in just a few taps," the company now says.
On Friday, Telegram said it had removed the People Nearby feature, which it said had "issues with bots and scammers." It also disabled users' ability to upload new media to Telegram, its blogging tool. The feature was seemingly "misused by anonymous actors," Durov said in a post, his second statement since his arrest on August 25 in France.
The platform has also provided an email address for automated takedown requests, instructing users to include links to content requiring moderator attention.
It's unclear how, and whether, this change impacts Telegram's ability to respond to requests from law enforcement agencies. The company has previously cooperated with court orders to share some information about its users.
Remi Vaughn, a Telegram spokesperson, claimed to TechCrunch that users could "always report messages from any group to moderators," a mechanism that "acts like forwarding." The change in the FAQ only makes it "clearer how to report content on Telegram, including via DSA," referring to Europe's Digital Services Act.
The update in the FAQ language follows Durov's arrest by French authorities in connection with an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions.
Responding to his arrest, Durov posted on his Telegram channel, criticizing the action: "Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach."
He argued that the established practice for countries dissatisfied with an internet service is to initiate legal action against the service itself, rather than its management. In a post Friday, he said 99% of its users have "nothing to do with crime."
Durov cautioned that if entrepreneurs were held responsible for potential abuse of their products, "no innovator will ever build new tools."
The story was updated to include comment from Telegram's spokesperson.
