00:02So Telegram is an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. It's actually originally founded
00:07by a Russian guy, but it's actually sort of headquartered out of the United Arab Emirates,
00:12and that's sort of where it operates. And it's really popular around the world. It's got sort
00:16of a billion odd users, well over a million users in Australia sort of on a monthly basis.
00:22So why would somebody choose that platform rather than, you know, all of the others we have,
00:27if you like? Yeah, so it's that end-to-end encrypted piece. It means people can communicate
00:32between each other knowing that it's not going to a central server somewhere and it goes from point
00:37to point and it's all getting encrypted end-to-end. That doesn't mean safety can't be looked at. It
00:44could still look at things before it gets sent. That's possible on other platforms, but yeah,
00:49Telegram is known for not proactively searching a lot for harmful material that's on its platform.
00:54So Joel, what then specifically are the allegations that the eSafety Commissioner has brought here?
00:59Yeah, so this is very much related to terror-related content. A bunch of harms happen on this platform,
01:05but it's terror-related content that eSafety and others have reported through the Telegram saying,
01:11hey, this content's on your platform, can you take it down? And it's taken months and months before
01:16that content gets taken down instead of being taken down sort of fairly quickly, which does occur on
01:20other platforms. It's a pretty safe assumption that people are going to share content that's bad,
01:26and so platforms need to have mechanisms in place to quickly remove it and stop it from spreading
01:31and stop it being exposed to people on their platform. It's illegal content.
01:36Not just terrorism though, because I know that you've done quite a lot of
01:39research into child exploitation and prevention on Telegram. What have you found there?
01:46Yeah, so this is a platform where there's lots and lots of CSAN or child sexual abuse material being
01:51shared. And if we look at surveys of offenders from the dark web, over 40% of them say that
01:57they
01:57use Telegram as a platform to share content or indeed to contact children. Only sort of very recently we've
02:04had survey results sort of come out or results coming out showing that within Australia in relation to
02:12sex extortion. Telegram is one of those platforms that that occurs on. They sort of contact the the
02:18young people on Instagram or something, invite them over to Telegram to chat further, and that's where
02:23they get have sexual extortion undertaken against them. What sort of obligations are there for
02:29Telegram indeed to any platform to take down content? Yeah, so in Australia we have pretty strong
02:35regulations in relation to that sort of top tier worst of the worst content, whether it's child sexual
02:40abuse material, abuse material or terrorism content, the platforms need to be looking for it and removing
02:44it from their platforms. And so that removing of illegal content is actually very much one of
02:50eSafety's sort of, you know, things that they enforce under the Online Safety Act. So do any of these
02:56platforms need a license as such or permission to be operable in any one country? Yeah, so in this
03:04context, Telegram doesn't need a license, I don't believe, to operate in Australia. And so in terms
03:10of if they don't respond to this, if you know, the High Court sort of request is basically to effectively
03:15ban it from the country, because it's not fulfilling those obligations that are spelled out in terms of
03:20proactively removing this kind of content. And Telegram is very much one of the platforms that's
03:25primarily relying on people reporting the content that's bad on their platform, whereas some other
03:30platforms are much better at actually proactively looking for it. And Telegram does the smallest
03:35amount of proactive looking, it could do an awful lot more in that space to keep content that's
03:40illegal off their platform. Yeah, the eSafety Commissioner made clear of frustrations as well
03:45as to how long this has taken because Telegram did not participate, if you like, with questioning.
03:54I mean, what is their stance on this? Do they simply say it's free speech?
03:59Yeah, that's very much sort of what a lot of these sort of platforms sort of go back to. They're
04:04like,
04:04oh, it's our right to share this content and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day,
04:09this content in relation to terror content, it's, you know, it's footage of murders and all sorts of
04:14horrible things. And then obviously in the child abuse material space, it's children being abused, which
04:19at a fundamental level is also a breach of their privacy. So even privacy advocates saying, oh, we've got a
04:25right to have our privacy. It's like, well, yeah, but you're violating these children's privacy by
04:30sharing these abuse images of them. So that privacy argument doesn't really hold water if you look at
04:35it in terms of, you know, under the UN Convention of Human Rights and everyone's sort of right to
04:41things and particularly the rights of children being paramount.
04:43Joel, we should just mention as well that something that happened yesterday, charges being brought
04:48against the Telegram founder, a guy by the name of Pavel Jurov, aiding terrorism in relation to
04:55Ukraine. There's also a legal challenge in France. So is this an international push,
05:01if you like, against Telegram?
05:03Yeah. I mean, the French one was a bit over a year ago now, but there's been pushes in a
05:08range
05:08of different countries. He's obviously had some Russian flak before as well. But yes, in the last
05:1424 hours, sort of, you know, Putin and the Russian administration, they're accusing him of basically
05:20supporting terrorists, which in that context is Ukrainians and the sort of attacks that they're
05:25sort of seeing across Russia lately against the oil refineries and those sorts of things. So
05:29in that context, yes, it's, it's, it's bad, but we're probably in Australia supportive of Ukraine
05:33and that, that illegal war as well.
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