- há 1 dia
Reporter Bronagh Munro investigates how the Telegram app, owned by Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, can be used to spread harmful and dangerous content.
Categoria
😹
DiversãoTranscrição
00:00This social media app's been described as a one-stop shop for crime.
00:09It's all here man, they're 100% legit.
00:12Telegram is definitely one of the most important platforms criminals are using now.
00:17Six million people in the UK have Telegram on their phone.
00:22So on a scale of 1 to 10, Telegram I would say is an 11.
00:27It's a site where you can buy almost anything.
00:32This guy has just basically said he can send me an Uzi to Belfast in two or three days.
00:37And its billionaire owner has boasted about not reporting anyone to the police.
00:43Through over two years of our existence we haven't disclosed a single bite of data to third parties, including governments.
00:50So how has Pavel Durov got away with it for so long?
00:57We at Telegram love freedom. Freedom to communicate privately. Freedom to express yourselves publicly.
01:19You may not recognise Pavel Durov, but he's one of the most powerful people on the planet.
01:29We strongly believe in giving people freedom to build their own tools, their own apps, their own businesses.
01:37He owns Telegram, a social media platform with almost a billion users worldwide.
01:44We have 250,000 users signing up daily for Telegram.
01:56It's promoted as a private messaging app.
01:59Pavel Durov claims he's protecting free speech.
02:08But French police think he's doing much more than that.
02:12Pavel Durov was arrested when he landed here in a private jet in August.
02:18He has been accused of eating drug dealing, the sharing of child sexual abuse images and organised crime on Telegram.
02:30The unprecedented nature of this case, arresting a tech CEO for their platform's use, has sparked a heated debate about freedom of speech and accountability.
02:39Pavel Durov will be arrested for at least 48 hours.
02:42The founder of Telegram is in one of the Paris CISOs.
02:45Pavel Durov denies the allegations.
02:54It's the first time the owner of a big social media company has been arrested.
03:04The arrest of Pavel Durov is completely unprecedented.
03:08The ramifications of this arrest are going to be felt by the tech industry,
03:13governments and users for years and years to come.
03:22This is why Pavel Durov has been arrested.
03:26Crime is rampant on his site.
03:29Get anything you see.
03:30$100 off, man. TTP verified, man. Come get rid of it.
03:33Come get rid of it.
03:39Oh, big respect, bro.
03:42Man's going to be putting a big order in next.
03:48Any user can set up their own channel on Telegram and broadcast worldwide.
03:53It's like having your own TV station with no regulation.
04:05Criminals are cashing in.
04:07What first struck you about Telegram?
04:13The fact that criminals feel so comfortable talking brazenly and openly about the type of operations that they were engaged in.
04:26Professor David Maimon has spent six years investigating illegal content on Telegram.
04:31We're looking at tens of thousands of channels, right, at this point.
04:37Tens of thousands of channels with illegal or harmful content?
04:41Yeah. Illegal content.
04:43You can join into criminal groups quite easily and see whatever interests you.
04:48Place a purchase simply by texting the admin or the vendor out there.
04:52And, you know, depending on the commodity and the distance, you could potentially have the illicit commodity within two to three business days.
05:01It's extraordinary, isn't it?
05:03It's really interesting and mind-boggling to understand how easy it is.
05:10It's all here, man. Everything here. 100% legit.
05:15Telegram has everything a criminal needs.
05:17It keeps their data private.
05:21Look! It's raining!
05:24Its channels provide a mass market.
05:27And there are sites that teach you how to profit from crime.
05:31You can also clone any voice you want to use to use on the video DM me now to get this updated.
05:36We make your work easy for you.
05:40This site teaches scammers how to change their appearance using AI.
05:44So they can pretend to be someone else online.
05:49So the guy in the bottom left-hand corner, he's the criminal? Potentially?
05:54Yeah. Allegedly this is the criminal.
05:57He's using and showing us how to use a tool which will allow you to swap your face with another person and then talk to another person online, live.
06:08All the information you need is available on Telegram.
06:12If you want to facilitate with a vendor and you want to talk to a hacker or you want to talk to someone who can help you get the stuff you need, you can do that on Telegram.
06:24Telegram is definitely one of the most important platforms criminals are using now for criminality.
06:30Some nice shit.
06:35Telegram says it removes millions of pieces of harmful content every day.
06:44There you go. Yeah, bro.
06:47But you can still buy almost anything on the site.
06:50I need some sticks. I need an Uzi and a shotgun.
07:06Oop! Chief! Did you see how quick it was?
07:10This guy's just sent a picture of an Uzi and said he could get it fast tracked to Belfast two or three days and it would cost me 150 quid.
07:21You think that's legit?
07:23We know that it's legit.
07:25Okay.
07:26Based on our investigations, based on our work in Telegram, 90% of what we're looking at is legit.
07:38In the context of drugs, guns, counterfeit products, if you place a purchase you're actually going to get what you're looking for.
07:45The criminality on Telegram hasn't affected Pavel Durov's popularity.
08:00He's an online hero.
08:06It all springs from his past in Russia.
08:08In 2006, he founded VKontakt or VK.
08:18It became the country's biggest social media platform.
08:24VK became extremely popular in Russia because basically it's a replica of Facebook.
08:30You can watch TV, you can watch films, you can download music.
08:33It was all for free, all pirated and there was no rules basically.
08:46VK was widely used by anti-Putin protesters.
08:52So in 2011, the authorities told Pavel Durov to shut down their accounts.
08:59He says he refused to help the Kremlin.
09:04He posted a picture and an internet myth was born.
09:09The resistance dog.
09:11Since then, this dog has become the mascot of free speech.
09:17But did Pavel Durov really defy the authorities?
09:22In 2012, this letter to a Kremlin official was leaked to a Russian newspaper.
09:35The name at the bottom of the letter was Pavel Durov.
09:38It's saying that we've been sharing information on thousands of users of our network.
09:45IP addresses, mobile phone numbers and other information which you need to identify with people.
09:52Pavel Durov told us the letter was forged as part of a campaign to discredit him.
10:02In 2014, he sold his share of VK for $300 million.
10:07I had to make a difficult decision because I was offered basically a choice between two suboptimal options.
10:19One of which was I would start complying to whatever the leaders of the country told me to do.
10:26The other one was I could sell my stake in the company, retire, resign as the CEO and leave the country.
10:40I chose the latter.
10:45It's another powerful story.
10:48But Pavel Durov wasn't exactly in exile.
10:51After selling VK, he regularly went to Russia to do business and visit his children.
10:59Please welcome CEO founder of VK.com, Pavel Durov.
11:06Pavel Durov also tells a questionable story about how he started Telegram.
11:12He claims he developed it using the cash he got from selling VContact in 2014.
11:20But Telegram was launched a year earlier, while he was still running VK.
11:27In addition to VK, you're working on a new Telegram?
11:32Yeah.
11:33Pavel Durov is not exactly out of favour with the Kremlin either.
11:42Since 2020, Telegram has been allowed to operate in Russia.
11:48Under Russian law, all social media firms operating in the country have to allow the security services access to user information.
11:57The system of national surveillance we have in the country is extremely, extremely totalitarian.
12:07So, if Telegram is operating in Russia, how likely is it that they're doing that without Russian authority access?
12:16I would say that right now the Russian authorities are quite satisfied with the level of cooperation provided by Telegram.
12:29Telegram told us it doesn't have any servers in Russia and hasn't handed over any information to the authorities.
12:36It's hard for anyone to regulate Telegram because it isn't based in a single country.
12:55Pavel Durov and his team move between different cities around the world.
12:59I'm in Barcelona to meet one of the few non-Russians who became part of his inner circle.
13:10When I first met Pavel Durov and he started talking about how he saw the future of messaging, I realised that, wow, we're just getting started.
13:20Ilus Campo worked closely with Pavel Durov at Telegram for six years.
13:30He says the billionaire ran every aspect of the company.
13:35The only person at the organisation who knew all the different team members and all the different teams and all the different initiatives was Pavel Ludov.
13:45So Pavel was the only person at the company who knew the whole picture of the organisation.
13:53He was the linchpin, sort of the centre point for everything?
13:56Yes.
13:58Was there anything that ever happened in Telegram that Pavel Durov didn't know about in your time?
14:03I'm sure there's details or things like that that he didn't know, but it's like anything major important for the organisation he knew and he took the decision.
14:12I'd like to welcome Elis Campo on stage for a conversation with me.
14:17Pavel Durov has tried to discredit Elis Campo by downplaying his role.
14:23But the evidence is overwhelming.
14:26You're now director of business development at Telegram.
14:30He was involved in high-level meetings and business deals for Telegram.
14:34It's interesting because there's so much evidence. There's so much people that can vouch for the work that we did and can help to question why would they do that?
14:49So these bits of lack of integrity, I think it's what's been mostly disappointing for me over the last few years.
14:59Telegram doesn't only help criminals. It helps promote extremism too.
15:17I've come to North Carolina to meet one of the few people who have studied how Telegram actually works.
15:27She says that the site has an algorithm that pushes users towards ever more extreme content.
15:33The Southern Poverty Law Centre is about to publish research based on a study of 28,000 Telegram channels.
15:45It reveals how a new feature introduced by Telegram makes toxic recommendations.
15:53Professor Megan Squire is the lead author.
15:56On a scale of 1 to 10, Telegram, I would say, is an 11.
16:02It's a one-stop shop. It's dishing out enormous amounts of criminal content, extremist content.
16:11I mean, you name it, it is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
16:20Megan's set up a new Telegram account to show how the algorithm works.
16:24She starts by simply searching for Donald Trump.
16:29And immediately you're shown a whole bunch of different channels.
16:35But what I want to draw our attention to is over here, there's this similar channels area.
16:41Oh, yes, yes.
16:43So we click in and we're shown what other channels might I be interested in.
16:47I've got QAnon content here, multiple channels.
16:50All right, let's pick one randomly.
16:55Here we go.
16:57It is a combination MAGA scheme and a scam.
17:02We've obviously initiated that by typing a word.
17:04But all of the other recommendations thereafter are Telegram chosen or algorithm chosen.
17:09It's an algorithm that's trying to tell me if you liked this, you'll really like this.
17:13So it's suggesting what other folks like me thought was interesting.
17:20So why don't we look for something that happened recently in the UK, like the UK riots?
17:25Have we searched those words?
17:26Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can do that.
17:27We can do that.
17:30The content Telegram promotes can be shocking.
17:34And the first meme that you're shown is a Hitler was right.
17:39And by the way, there were no other results there.
17:42That was all we were given.
17:43So again, we've got 75 similar channels.
17:46Oh, yeah, so let's see the similar channels.
17:48So, okay, now you've got, looks like some nationalist groups, very British.
17:55Oh, this is a very bad channel.
17:58Some of these groups are pretty active.
18:01You're not just on Telegram getting memes.
18:03Like you're getting shuffled into actual events.
18:07They're having events on the ground with people showing up.
18:09Telegram told us users are only presented with content they have chosen to engage with.
18:18But the more you click, the more extreme the content can become on Pavel Durf's platform.
18:26It does not appear that he has the level of respect for the law that we see in a normal tech platform.
18:34It appears that he does not care.
18:36How much responsibility should he have?
18:38It's his platform.
18:40All, all of it.
18:42All the responsibility is on his head.
18:44Save the cats and dogs from the hordes of Haitian in Springfield, Ohio.
18:49Telegram told us it removed 35 million pieces of extremist content between July and September this year alone.
18:59Time to die!
19:00Time to die!
19:05But there's still plenty on the site.
19:10Our former insider says Pavel Durf simply wasn't interested in moderation.
19:16Ilus Campo says he challenged Pavel Durf about extremist content in 2021.
19:27His stance was it's not up to a platform like us to decide who should be speaking out.
19:34It was clear that he didn't want to dedicate more resources to it.
19:40And I think if he could choose, he would choose more a stance where he doesn't have to moderate anything.
19:47Telegram denies there are countless channels promoting extremist and illegal content.
19:53It says it takes the issue very seriously and has a moderation team of over 800 people.
19:59It's committed to combating illegal content and now removes over a million public communities each month for violations.
20:14Despite all the criminality on his site, Pavel Durf has boasted about his refusal to share any user information.
20:22Through over two years of our existence, we haven't disclosed a single bite of data to third parties, including governments.
20:31That claim was repeated on Telegram until Pavel Durf's arrest this August.
20:40By refusing to pass information to the police, Telegram has allowed those who abuse children to get away with their crimes.
20:50When did you first become concerned about Telegram?
20:55When we saw them being advertised on social media platforms.
20:59The Internet Watch Foundation, or IWF, says Telegram hosts a large volume of child sexual abuse material.
21:08We'd see groups talking about child sexual abuse material.
21:12And we have seen thousands of links hosted on Telegram servers that are directly displaying child sexual abuse material.
21:17Or the promise of more imagery if you join the groups.
21:25Dinner in five minutes, Evie.
21:30The IWF makes videos like this to show the dangers to children online.
21:35We are seeing the worst of the worst. The cruelty in each and every image that we come across.
21:50You look so pretty in your picture, Evie.
21:53Each image is a crime scene. And each time that image is shared and spread or sold over and over, that child is being re-victimised.
22:04And so over and over again, people are looking at and profiting from images of children being sexually abused.
22:13And that's awful.
22:17Telegram says it has promptly removed every image that the charity has reported.
22:23But the IWF says many are reposted soon after being removed.
22:29It could be easily stopped.
22:32The charity has software that can identify and remove child sexual abuse images.
22:37What if technology existed that could automatically hunt out imagery, flag it for removal, and even stop it from being uploaded in the first place?
22:50The software scans online content and checks it against a database of flagged pictures.
22:57All the big social media firms use it, except one.
23:02Telegram refused to sign up.
23:04Do you think Telegram have a legitimate excuse then to have not done it?
23:09I don't think anyone has a legitimate excuse to have not done it.
23:12There is no legitimate use for any platform that is handling, allowing user-generated content, uploading and sharing images and videos, to not be doing this.
23:20Before the French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, they say they'd made 2,460 requests for information.
23:36Some about child abusers.
23:39Telegram didn't respond to a single one.
23:42Could there be anybody else within Telegram that made those decisions apart from Pavel Durov?
23:51If he was not the person who received these first hand, these were forwarded to him to take a decision on whether to comply or even reply to these.
24:05Telegram says the French requests were never received and that it processes all properly submitted requests.
24:15It has a strict zero tolerance policy to child sex abuse material.
24:20In November alone, more than 48,000 groups and channels were removed.
24:28And Pavel Durov is not involved in the majority of individual legal requests.
24:33Back in the UK, Telegram says it responded to three requests from law enforcement this year.
24:49The National Crime Agency have told us the platform responded to only one of its requests.
24:56The NCA say that Telegram is widely used by criminals to cause harm.
25:04They say it had a long-standing policy of non-cooperation with law enforcement.
25:10And that it's too early to tell if there's been any real meaningful change since Pavel Durov's arrest that would make Telegram a less damaging platform.
25:21Telegram has now announced a U-turn.
25:23It's finally agreed to use the IWF software to remove child sexual abuse material.
25:32Did the shift in attitude of Telegram come before or after that arrest?
25:38After the arrest.
25:40So it could have been done before now?
25:42It absolutely could have been done before now.
25:44Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Prime Minister.
25:46So what more can be done to stop Telegram from promoting criminality and extremism?
25:54Telegram has been described as the app of choice for extremists.
25:59When he was in opposition, Keir Starmer called for an urgent clampdown.
26:04The Prime Minister and the government could stop this by making it clear that directors of companies are criminally liable for failing to tackle this type of material on their side.
26:15Now, his government says the answer is to implement the new Online Safety Act.
26:23But that will rely on the honesty and transparency of the platforms.
26:27In France, they're taking a tougher approach.
26:36Pavel Durov is currently on bail and not allowed to leave the country.
26:40For years, Pavel Durov has allowed Telegram to be used for the worst kinds of criminality.
26:53And it's only since his arrest has he offered to clean up his platform.
26:57But can we really trust him to do what he says?
27:03It means a lot to me to have the support of so many areas.
27:06For now, Telegram is still awash with harmful content.
27:13Look at these beautiful swastikas.
27:15There we go, white power.
27:17Pavel Durov says it's all about privacy and freedom of speech.
27:22Yeah, make America white again.
27:27The time for Telegram to regulate itself is over.
27:31And they've proven that they're not up to the task.
27:32It is something that folks need to be aware of now.
27:36This app is a problem.
27:40I don't think Pavel, Telegram, or any tech platforms can or should hide behind the claim of privacy to allow illegal activity, and particularly the sexual abuse of children.
27:52It's just not acceptable.
27:54While he's on bail, Pavel Durov is saying all the right things.
27:59So will the threat of prison finally force the Russian billionaire to clean up his sight?
28:06It's a fatal disaster.
28:07Yes.
28:12We'll see you in the next episode.
28:30Transcription by CastingWords
Seja a primeira pessoa a comentar