Telegram has announced that it will use tools and data from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to analyze, detect and eradicate all content related to child abuse (CSAM) on the platform.
Internet Watch Foundation is a British organization that brings together a group of experts from around the world dedicated to address videos and images related to pedophile content and sexual assaults on children.
IWF offers a series of protection functions to users of companies, organizations, such as Public interest Registry (PIR), and social networks or platforms, a service in which Telegram has recently been interested.
Telegram will implement new IWF tools to proactively prevent the spread of child sexual abuse images through its platform. In this way, it will use both its own data and that of this organization to detect, interrupt, delete and block CSAM images and videos.
Likewise, Telegram will use unique fingerprints of millions of known images and videos of sexual abuse of minors, in order to detect in real time when this criminal content is shared on the social network.
Besides, will use IWF solutions aimed at detecting harmful material created by artificial intelligence (AI) and identifying accounts used to distribute and profit from pedophile material.
From IWF they have pointed out that “this is a first transformative step on a much longer path” and that, as a new member of its community, “Telegram can help ensure that this material cannot be shared on the service,” in the words from the IWF interim executive director, Derek Ray-Hill.
Likewise, they have pointed out that Telegram eliminates “hundreds of thousands of child abuse materials every month” based on different reports and proactive moderation tools that include AI and machine learning.
“IWF’s datasets and tools will strengthen the mechanisms Telegram has in place to protect its public platform and further ensure that it can continue eliminating effectively child abuse content before it can reach users,” concluded Telegram’s director of press and media relations, Remi Vaughn.