Published: Wed 18 Dec 2024
Internet Watch Foundation Interim CEO Derek Ray-Hill writes on why we are working with Telegram to tackle child sexual abuse material online.
Child sexual abuse imagery is a horror that blights our world wherever it exists. It is not always hidden in dark corners of the internet but out in the open, freely shared and viewed on publicly accessible areas of the web.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is the UK’s front line against child sexual abuse imagery online. More than one million webpages (1,069,488) showing at least one, and often many tens, hundreds or thousands of child sexual abuse images and videos have been removed from the internet thanks to our work over the past five years alone.
Since 2022, the IWF has assessed and confirmed thousands of reports of child sexual abuse imagery on the social media platform Telegram. On December 4, we granted Telegram membership of the IWF.
This means that for the first time, Telegram, which has more than 950 million active users a month, will use tools and data from the IWF in addition to its own to detect, disrupt, remove, and block child sexual abuse imagery.
This partnership is a transformational first step on what will be a much longer journey to bring an end to the spread of child sexual abuse material online.
Recently, the UK Government published its draft Statement of Strategic Priorities for online safety, emphasising a proactive approach to safety by design to prevent harm before it occurs.
A key element of this draft statement makes clear that online platforms and search services must work towards ensuring that there are no safe havens for illegal content and activity, child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The IWF cannot do what we do, targeting and removing child sexual abuse images and videos from the internet, without meaningful partnerships with the tech industry.
These partnerships include a range of companies and platforms, websites and online spaces, where sexual pictures and recordings of children are at risk of being uploaded, shared, stored and consumed.
Establishing these working relationships is vital because to do otherwise would be like trying to achieve our mission of eliminating child sexual abuse online with one hand tied behind our back.
By becoming a Member, Telegram will be able to access the IWF’s world-leading datasets and technology, such as our Image Hash Lists of known child sexual abuse imagery, to tackle the spread of this criminal content on public areas of the platform.
This is an important moment, and we will be working hard with Telegram to make sure this commitment continues and expands to the whole sector. In this, we stand ready to support the tech industry by providing our tried and tested services in line with the expectations outlined in Ofcom’s Codes of Practice this week.
As well as providing access to our services, the IWF will report directly into Telegram when child sexual abuse imagery is detected and work with them to remove it swiftly. And we will work closely with Telegram to ensure its services are being used effectively.
It’s not enough for solutions to known issues, such as child sexual abuse material, to merely exist – online service providers must actively implement and deploy these solutions to enhance online safety and ensure their platforms are free from illegal content and activity.
We look forward to seeing what further steps we can take together with Telegram and the wider tech industry to create a world in which the spread of online sexual abuse material is virtually impossible and, when it does happen, we are able to remove it very quickly and permanently.
New online safety guidelines need to be more ambitious if the “hopes of a safer internet” are to be realised, the IWF warns.
