Victoria, a 27-year-old Filipino makeup artist living in New York City, spent the first few months of quarantine honing what she called a healthy routine. She was cooking more, working with a therapist to help build a strong relationship with her boyfriend, taking bike rides.
Then she got a DM from a stranger.
In June, Victoria opened Instagram to find a message from Sarah, a 21-year-old woman in Manila. The two women had something in common: They had both dated a man named Gabriel, and he had been allegedly sharing their intimate photos and videos on the messaging app Telegram, via private groups called “Paradise” and “The Secret Place.” The Secret Place had roughly 75 members. At its height, Paradise had nearly 300.
Sarah informed Victoria that she’d seen intimate pictures of Victoria — pictures that Victoria had taken for Gabriel’s eyes only — posted by a username that matched Gabriel’s phone number. Gabriel appeared to be sharing pictures and videos of Sarah that she never knew he had captured in the first place. The women were on opposite sides of the globe, but they say they are both victims of one man’s devastating betrayals.
As Victoria scrolled, she felt waves of shock and disgust shoot through her body. Over the next few weeks, Victoria stopped eating. Her bicycle gathered dust. Then came anger, and the desire to do something — really do something. She and Sarah would seek justice to the fullest extent of the law, eventually leading to Gabriel seeing his day in court.
While some social media and messaging platforms have taken steps in recent years to limit the spread of revenge porn, also known as nonconsensual pornography or the sharing of nonconsensual intimate images, the problem continues to find new breeding ground in the internet’s shadows, like on Telegram. Laws crafted to punish those who share nonconsensual pornography have numerous weaknesses, especially when the offense stretches across international borders. Those laws aren't designed to scrub the images from the internet, either.
This parallel reality — one in which an illegal activity gets haphazardly pursued in the real world, but the behavior persists online — extends across the globe.
Faced with legal hurdles and murky regulation, how can victims fight for control of the countless images that are still out there? When a slippery network like Telegram is the locus of this abuse, a course for justice, both online and off, is difficult to chart.
Victoria asked to go by her first name, while Sarah is using a pseudonym for safety reasons. We’re not using Gabriel’s full name, although it’s available in public documents, because he’s a private citizen and his legal case is ongoing.
Gabriel and Telegram didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“He made me feel safe,” Sarah said. “I trusted him.”
What is “private,” anyhow?
Telegram is a messaging app in which users can send direct messages to their friends, follow and contribute to public “channels” that are unlimited in size, and take part in large public or private group chats with strangers. Groups can be as small as two people; the largest groups can have up to 200,000 users.
Image abuse is indeed diffuse across networks — one in eight social media users report being victims of nonconsensual pornography — but unlike WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, Telegram’s FAQs say that the platform won’t “process any requests” regarding illegal content that appears in chats or private groups. This hands-off approach is key to Telegram’s major selling point as a privacy-focused messaging app, but it enables its users to share illicit content with slim to no penalties. As a result, it serves as a popular platform for spreading nonconsensual porn in multiple countries around the world, as recent investigations in Israel, Italy, and South Korea have shown.
"A combination of its architecture, global jurisdiction, and content moderation policies make Telegram the perfect place for spreading revenge porn."
“Sadly, a combination of its architecture, global jurisdiction, and content moderation policies make Telegram the perfect place for spreading revenge porn,” Ysabel Gerrard, a University of Sheffield professor of sociology who studies content moderation and digital platforms, said.
While they may be “private” in name, Telegram’s group chats can be enormous communities where all sorts of information and content passes between strangers. Links to private groups circulate within communities, and joining them as an outsider is simple. Two Italian researchers who studied the proliferation of nonconsensual porn on Telegram simply messaged the administrator of a pornography website, asked to be added to pornographic Telegram groups, and were invited, no questions asked. Once they were part of one group, they received links within Telegram to many others.
Telegram’s Terms of Service prohibits the sharing of “illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels, bots, etc.” There is an email — [email protected] — through which users can report this content. It’s not clear whether Telegram proactively monitors its public spaces, or relies entirely on user reports of illegal behavior.
However, how and what Telegram moderates in public channels is beside the point, since “the nonconsensual groups for revenge porn are almost always private, or even secret,” said Silvia Semenzin, one of the Italian researchers mentioned above who, along with Lucia Bainotti, published exhaustive research on Telegram’s architecture and its users’ motivations and behavioral patterns earlier this year. Semenzin and Bainotti are Ph.D. students in sociology at the University of Milan and University of Torino, respectively.
Victoria and Sarah never reported the abuse to Telegram, not just to preserve evidence, but also due to a lack of faith that Telegram would take any action. The women said they have had to accept the fact that strangers online can look at their naked bodies, likely forever. What choice do they have, really? Even if the content were removed from one Telegram group, it may very well circulate through another. Their photos are lost to the many circles of Telegram hell, spinning out of control.
“We had realized that, you know what, our pictures are out there,” Victoria said. “We have to accept this when we are focusing on putting our perpetrator in jail. We will deal with these Telegram groups when we feel more at peace.”
Mashable saw screen recordings that showed the Telegram groups Paradise and The Secret Place were still active and the women’s photos had not been deleted as of the end of September. The women are no longer able to access the groups.
At least in theory, Telegram is supposed to conform to Apple and Google’s standards to appear in their respective app stores. Apple's App Store policies require apps with user-generated content to offer users the ability to report objectionable content like defamation, violence, and porn. Apple declined to say whether it considered Telegram’s refusal to process any user reports regarding private chats and groups to be a loophole.
But Apple has previously found itself in the position of doing the policing that Telegram refuses to do: In 2018, Apple booted Telegram from the App Store after investigating and verifying users’ reports of child pornography being circulated on the platform. The app was only reinstated once it purportedly adopted new measures to control illegal activity. Since then, highly-publicized reports have exposed nonconsensual porn rings in at least three countries, and yet the app is still in Apple's store. Apple said it informs apps of complaints in general, but didn't indicate if it would be reaching out to Telegram when Mashable brought this issue to its attention.
As for Android users, Google didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on whether Telegram’s content moderation policies amounted to the “robust, effective, and ongoing UGC moderation” that it requires of apps available in Google Play.
In addition to the large private groups without reporting functions and the hands-off approach to moderating public channels, the Italian researchers found certain features let nonconsensual porn flourish on Telegram:
Allowing for anonymity
The ability to easily replicate and make backup groups (in the case of shutdowns or suspensions)
Bots that allow for the automatization of abuse (although Telegram notes it will regulate public bots)
Business operations based in Dubai
Distributed server infrastructure to avoid the jurisdiction of any one country
Russian brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov founded Telegram in 2013 as a messaging platform for the hacker and activist communities; it was their privacy-focused answer to the Russian government’s takeover of the platform they had previously founded, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, VK (short for VKontakte). Today, Telegram has a much broader user base, with an estimated 400 million monthly active users.
“Telegram was born with the idea of protecting the online privacy of [and] providing a safe space for activists and people who need to stay safer from external authorities,” Semenzin said. “The thing is that, of course, when you provide anonymity online, there are also illicit behaviors that take place.”
It’s not always about revenge
The term “revenge porn” tends to be a misnomer. According to a 2017 survey by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, an organization that aids and advocates for victims of nonconsensual pornography, “revenge” or “hurting the victim” is not the motivation for 79 percent of those sharing the images. That’s why many advocates and academics prefer the term “nonconsensual.”
"Gabriel had spoken to me and was friendly with me while he was sending out revenge porn."
“I've read a lot about revenge porn, and I always thought that it would be from, like abusive boyfriends and guys who are angry and trying to get back at their exes,” Victoria said. “Gabriel had spoken to me and was friendly with me while he was sending out revenge porn.”
Gabriel and Victoria met via a mutual friend, who made the introduction online at Gabriel’s request, she said. Gabriel lived in Canada; Victoria was a bit of a nomad, moving between the Philippines, New York, and elsewhere. It turned out their families in Manila knew each other, and Victoria was told he was a nice guy.
Since 10 percent of the world’s 110 million Filipinos live abroad, “transnational romances” like the one between Victoria and Gabriel are common, according to Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who studies digital media in the Philippines at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Of every country in the world, people spend the most time online in the Philippines, where Facebook functions as the door to the internet, and couples rely heavily on social media and digital communications to maintain their relationships.
Victoria and Gabriel met up in Toronto for New Year’s Eve 2018/2019, celebrating and even going to church with family. Gabriel also visited Victoria in New York once. However, Victoria said the two primarily conducted their relationship over DMs, FaceTime, and phone calls. The couple would talk for hours about their family, friends, and mutual acquaintances, and sometimes they’d send each other explicit selfies and messages. They would laugh a lot; he was silly, Victoria said. Whenever they shared the same thought, they’d send the siren emoji to each other, she added.
During Gabriel’s visit last year, Victoria discovered that he’d been sharing her intimate photos with friends in the Philippines. Enraged, she threw his phone at the wall, and the relationship was over.
“I just didn’t think he would do that,” Victoria said, noting that she asked him not to share her photos. “I thought I had a great relationship with him.”
Nearly a year and a half after the breakup, the pair smoothed things over after an hours-long phone call, Victoria said. Afterwards, Gabriel sent Victoria’s mother a DM on Instagram reporting that the two were friends again.
Days later, Victoria received that sickening message from Sarah. Her intimate videos, Instagram handle, and other contact information had been shared with hundreds of strangers on Telegram, screenshots of the Telegram messages show.
Those posting intimate images online without consent may dox their victims as well, sharing their names, social media handles, or other contact information. Then people who see the photos will harass the victims by sending dick pics or “slut shaming” insults or seeking confirmation that the photos are indeed them.
In other words, not everyone who sees nonconsensual porn in private online groups keeps quiet about it. That’s how Sarah found out that Gabriel was allegedly circulating phone-sex videos of her that he took without her knowledge in large online groups along with her identity and contact information.
“Men were messaging me, adding me, requesting to follow me,” Sarah said. “My identity is out there with, like photos and videos, and [I] don't know what those guys who actually saw it would think of or would actually do.”
A chilling message from a stranger
Sarah met Gabriel in a coffee shop in the Philippines. He asked for her Facebook information, and they later met up at a restaurant and a bar with his friends, taking selfies together over the next few days, she said. Gabriel acted protectively toward Sarah while out in public; he made her feel respected and secure. For the next six months, the two carried out an online relationship through FaceTime and DMs. Sarah said Gabriel shared a lot about his life, further earning Sarah’s trust — so much so that she was comfortable being intimate over video chat.
Then Gabriel stopped talking to her, she said. It felt completely out of the blue.
Two weeks later, Gabriel sent her a photo of herself, naked. She asked Gabriel what he wanted; her first instinct was that he was trying to blackmail her, text messages show. She was shocked he even had the photo since she had never taken nor sent anything of the kind. More silence followed. Three months later, Gabriel claimed he had sent the photo by accident, though he didn’t specify how he had it in the first place, she said.
Two weeks after she received his dubious explanation, a stranger sent Sarah a screenshot of Gabriel’s profile and asked her, “do you know this guy?” A second man sent her videos of her performing the intimate acts she said Gabriel had talked her into doing (and swore he wasn’t recording) over video chat. It seemed, however, that he had secretly recorded their video chats. She realized that could be the source of the first mysterious photo and all these others. Sarah read the messages Gabriel allegedly sent to the group, boasting about his conquests, making derogatory remarks about her, and posting her personal information. She also saw information about the group, she said, and the intimate content of other women shared there by Gabriel and others.
Most terrifying for Sarah was that the group was composed mostly of local men who were also in Manila. While Filipinos embrace social media and technology, the Philippines is also a heavily Catholic country with exacting moral standards around sexuality and a victim-blaming culture. Gabriel sharing the photos that he had illicitly taken put her reputation, as well as her safety, at risk. Sarah does not leave her house, fearing that she will be assaulted or raped. The Philippines has a high rate of reported rapes and prosecution is rare.
“I really don’t go out now because I’m afraid the guys I might meet or the guys I see outside might have seen that photo,” Sarah said. “It’s really hard.”
A borderless crime
Despite the upheaval and pain, the women, together, took action. The first step was posting on social media. Victoria explained what Gabriel allegedly had done and told his family about it. The women had been hoping that a family member would step in to take away Gabriel’s phone and laptop to stop him from posting their images. No one from Gabriel’s family, save a distant cousin, responded or expressed any sort of remorse, Victoria said. So the women decided to elevate things, which meant contacting the police.
Anti-nonconsensual pornography laws differ from country to country and even within the United States. While there is no federal law against the dissemination of nonconsensual porn in the U.S., New York City (where Victoria lives) does have a law that criminalizes the behavior. In 2015, Canada (where Gabriel lives) amended its criminal code to make nonconsensual pornography a crime. The Philippines (where Sarah lives) has a law against taking intimate images without consent, point blank.
“One of the most challenging aspects of nonconsensual pornography is that it's a borderless crime, that it can travel across countries, can travel across the world and you can have a perpetrator in one state, you can have a victim in a different country,” Mary Anne Franks, an attorney and the president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, said. “There are all these kinds of moving parts that make it really difficult to be able to effectively prosecute these kinds of cases.”
Telegram also intentionally avoids the reach of any one country’s laws. A few years ago, when the Russian government started pressuring the app to hand over user data, Telegram’s operations moved from St. Petersburg to Dubai, where there are fewer regulations — and, as a result, less legal accountability for hosting nonconsensual porn on Telegram’s servers.
Tweet may have been deleted
Dubai has promoted itself as a tech hub. While it has tightened restrictions on internet companies recently, loose regulations still make it a popular spot to base a business.
Further complicating the issue, Telegram has servers around the globe. This is common among tech firms. The multinational approach prevents the company from being shut down by any one government, and, as Telegram says, makes it more difficult for law enforcement to request data. That helps protect user privacy, but, again, can shield users from being accountable for sharing illegal content.
“It is really difficult to understand who is in charge at the legal level.”
“As far as we know, Telegram is based in Dubai, but there is no jurisdiction that forces Telegram to respond to any kind of law,” Bainotti said. “It is really difficult to understand who is in charge at the legal level.”
To make a case in front of a judge, the women decided on a multi-front attack, contacting both the New York Police Department and a Canadian police department, but immediately ran into challenges related to where they should go for help and what they needed to inspire action from law enforcement.
“Where do you start?” Victoria said. “You can't just call some hotline.”
Victoria eventually spoke with an officer and filed a police report with the Peel Regional Police in Ontario. Because police weren’t able to access the groups, Victoria said she had to provide all the evidence. The officer needed documentation of the images and the groups, and Victoria would have to prove that the woman in the photos was her. She had to send a selfie and a photo of the bra depicted in one of the images that showed her naked from the chest down. A police department representative declined to comment on whether this was common practice and whether officers receive training for responding to nonconsensual porn allegations.
Putting the onus on victims to provide evidence, as well as blaming victims for the sharing of nonconsensual porn, adds an additional layer of trauma to an already frustrating and demoralizing situation.
NYPD officers came to Victoria’s home and took her statement, but were stymied early on by issues of jurisdiction, she said. Victoria ended up getting a member of the Canadian police on the phone, and attempted to pass it to an NYPD officer so the two agencies could confer. The NYPD officer refused, she said. All the NYPD would do was file a report, noting that it was up to Canadian authorities to pursue Gabriel.
“It felt like they were just passing the case towards each other,” Victoria said.
While she was giving her statement, one NYPD officer asked Victoria questions about her relationship with Gabriel — but the inquiries quickly crossed a line, she said.
“[He] asked me over and over again, ‘Why'd you send it?’” Victoria said. “Like, ‘You know, when you do send intimate pictures, of course it's going to get out there.’” Victoria couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I was in complete shock.”
An NYPD representative didn’t comment on the conduct of this officer, but confirmed the Telegram situation was outside of NYPD jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, Victoria’s experience with the police is common.
“It's a really exhausting and very, for many victims, traumatizing process to go through: the process of actually having to report, having to tell strangers about what's happened to you, which almost certainly will involve showing the images to strangers, having to sort through all the kinds of materials that are posted about them, gather them in a file and turn that over to law enforcement or to their attorneys, and then hope that the person or persons who are taking this information are going to take it seriously,” Franks said. “And then hope that you'll be respected throughout the process that you won't be blamed for what's happened to you.”
Since Gabriel allegedly had secretly taken the nude imagery of Sarah, she would seem to have a case under Filipino law. However, the international nature of her case and a lack of faith in the police discouraged the women from pursuing this avenue.
“I can file a case. But because he doesn’t live here, and he's a citizen of Canada, I don't know what filing a case here would really do. He won’t get arrested. So the jurisdiction really is something hard for me,” Sarah said.
Feeling powerless to access the power of the law is a common experience in the Philippines, partially because it is so socioeconomically stratified, according to Atienza.
“There are laws in the Philippines, but who has access to justice?” Atienza asked. “A lot of times the police don’t really arrest people. It really is about your own social standing and power in order to really activate the law.”
Preventing nonconsensual porn
Due to nonconsensual porn laws in Canada, Gabriel was arrested in August and charged with one count of publishing an intimate image without consent. His next court appearance is set for Friday, according to a court representative.
The women see this as a victory; they are amazed that the law appears to actually be working on their behalf. But his case may drag on, the charge could be dropped, or he may not be convicted.
This isn’t the first time posters of nonconsensual intimate images have faced legal repercussions. In 2019, Israeli police arrested 12 members of a Telegram group that shared nonconsensual porn with thousands of members. At the time, Yuval Gold, one of the women whose nudes were shared, said that she was encouraged by the actions of law enforcement.
Nearly a year after the arrests, her outlook isn’t as positive. Of the 12 arrested, three were charged and only two were actually convicted. One got 31 months, the other got nine months of community service, according to local news reports.
“I don't think Telegram can delete my photos. And if they do do it, there's 1,000 people that have my photos in their phone, so it doesn't matter,” Gold said. “Nobody cares.”
"A law is not sufficient."
“We finally had it recognized as a problem of gender violence, which was the most important thing,” Semenzin said of a 2019 law in Italy. “But these groups on Telegram still exist. So actually a law is not sufficient.”
Telegram also has an open API, which means developers can build upon, add to, or use Telegram’s code to make projects of their own. For example, users can make bots, which Bainotti and Semenzin found allows them to automate image abuse. New research from a security firm found Telegram bots that scrape photos on social media to generate deepfaked nude images, which can vary in quality from obvious fakes to realistically believable. Despite Telegram saying it moderates public bots for abuse, the report found these bots have created over 100,000 images, many of which were still live on the network earlier this month.
The open API additionally lets users avoid discipline. They can make replicas of groups so if one gets banned it can be easily reborn while maintaining the membership and content, Bainotti and Semenzin said.
Laws and platform policies have to be strengthened and unified across the globe, and the consequences for spreading nonconsensual porn have to accurately reflect the seriousness of the crime if we ever expect to see sufficient justice. Once photos are shared, they’re out there — so the best course of action is “deterrence,” Franks said.
“The emphasis really has to be on condemning this kind of behavior from a social perspective and a legal perspective,” Franks said. “That is, the only way that laws actually work is so that they don't actually have to be invoked. We don't want to have to ever use these laws and ask a victim to come forward with her reports. We want laws that are strong enough and clear enough that tell people who are thinking about engaging in this type of behavior that they will be severely punished so that they won't do this.”
Managing group size is one of the ways that Telegram competitors, including WhatsApp, tackle the spread of abusive content. WhatsApp caps groups at 256 members. After misinformation spreading on WhatsApp resulted in real-world violence in India, it took further action by limiting message forwarding.
“Imagine how easy it is to share these images with groups of more than 200,000 members,” Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, a lecturer in digital media at Queensland University of Technology, said. “It’s not perfect what WhatsApp is doing. But there are things that Telegram could do to show they are committed to this issue.”
Other platforms have specifically addressed nonconsensual porn. After a campaign by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit changed policies to explicitly prohibit nonconsensual pornography. Screenshots reviewed by Mashable showed that Gabriel was sharing nonconsensual porn over Facebook messaging in 2018, even though it was banned in 2015 (with Facebook relying on users reporting it rather than actively scanning for it at the time). However, in 2019, Facebook announced new resources for victims, and it’s now using AI to proactively identify nonconsensual pornography before it’s flagged.
Telegram could limit group size and forwarding like WhatsApp, or use automated technology, like Facebook says it does, to keep users from posting pornography, in private groups.
Telegram’s private groups aren’t end-to-end encrypted, but its secret chats are. However, encryption doesn’t have to mean carte blanche permissiveness for abusive behavior. WhatsApp clarified that, despite all messages being end-to-end encrypted, its users can report content and users to WhatsApp, which may disable accounts or share information with authorities. One can also report Facebook messages, which aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default.
They are hopeful that this court case will result in jail time. But they want something more: proactive action from Telegram.
Content moderation is a thorny issue for companies that want to provide privacy but also prevent abuse. Privacy advocates have opposed recent political measures meant to address problems like sharing child pornography because it weakens the ability of platforms to encrypt communications; some have even said these efforts to prevent child abuse are somewhat of a moral guise to allow law enforcement a wider window of surveillance, and could result in oppressive regimes exerting even more control on progressive movements.
To be improved offline, nonconsensual porn laws need to be standard across states and countries, be implemented by members of law enforcement who take the crime seriously and won’t retraumatize or blame victims, have harsh penalties, and remove language related to any intent to cause harm, Franks said. Sharing nonconsensual porn causes harm whether the distributor intended to or not.
Victoria and Sarah have not given up on the possibility of justice. They are hopeful that this court case will result in jail time. But they want something more: proactive action from Telegram.
“I want to get justice and I want him to be held accountable,” Sarah said. “The damage can’t be undone. And our photos are still on the internet... We don't know for sure if that's the only group where our photos are. So I want him to pay for it.”
If the Canadian justice system does its job, he will.
But he’s just one distributor of nonconsensual porn in an internet full of them.
—Additional reporting by Tulika Bose
If you have had intimate images shared without your consent, call the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s 24/7 hotline at 844-878-2274 for free, confidential support. The CCRI website also includes helpful information as well as a list of international resources.
