Telegram-An App Where Nude Pictures Of Women Are Shared Without Concent

Telegram: Where women's nudes are shared without consent.

A BBC investigation has found that women's intimate pictures are being shared to harass, shame and blackmail them on a massive scale, on the social media app Telegram.....

The BBC has been monitoring 18 Telegram channels and 24 groups in countries ranging from Russia to Brazil, and Kenya to Malaysia. The total number of subscribers is nearly two million.

Personal details like home addresses and parents' phone numbers were posted alongside explicit pictures.

We saw group administrators asking members to send intimate images of ex-partners, colleagues or fellow-students to an automated account, so they could be published without revealing the identity of the sender.

Telegram now says it has more than half a billion active users worldwide - that's more than Twitter - with many attracted by its emphasis on privacy.

Millions moved to Telegram in January 2021 from WhatsApp, which changed its privacy terms.

Telegram has long been popular with pro-democracy protesters in countries with media censorship. Users can post without sharing their name or phone number, and create public or private groups with up to 200,000 members, or channels which can broadcast to an unlimited number of people.

Despite Telegram's reputation for privacy, only the "secret chat" option provides end-to-end encryption, which ensures just the two people talking can see the message. It's the default setting on secure chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp.

The platform also attracts users seeking a less regulated space, including those who have been banned from other platforms.

"According to Telegram and its owner, they don't want to censor users," says Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at digital rights group Access Now.

But our research has shown this light-touch approach to moderation has led Telegram to become a haven for the leaking and sharing of intimate images.

Telegram does not have a dedicated policy to tackle the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, but its terms of service make users agree "not to post illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels, bots, etc".

It also has an in-app reporting feature across both public and private groups, and channels where users can report pornography.

To test the how rigorously Telegram enforced its policies, we found and reported 100 images as pornography via the in-app reporting feature. One month later, 96 remained accessible. We could not locate four others, as they were in groups which we could no longer access.

Read more of the original story culled from the BBC NEWS on this link: BBC