Telegram Publishes a Dashboard of Daily Moderation Actions ⇥ techcrunch.com

Charles Rollet, TechCrunch:

After announcing a crackdown in September, Telegram now says it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels related to harmful content like fraud and terrorism in 2024, noting this effort was “enhanced with cutting-edge AI moderation tools.”

This makes more sense to me if “A.I.” stands for “arrested and indicted”.

Telegram launched a new moderation dashboard. The charts are all shown with daily granularity and you can adjust the date range, but it is hard to get a clear sense of a trend. Rollet reports “there’s a noticeable increase in enforcement after Durov’s arrest in August”, but I am not sure that is so clear. I wanted to find out.

Happily, the chart source data is exposed in the page’s markup. A little copying-and-pasting and a little cleaning up yielded a Numbers document you can download with figures from December 2023 up to yesterday.¹ The trend line shows a modest increase in total moderation actions and banned terrorism communities. CSAM bans are, however, slightly declining.