Telegram is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app service that has slowly but steadily turned into a hotbed for the most distressing activities pertaining to its anonymous number display facility. It has recently been reported that some fraudsters are using this capability to market sexually explicit and fake videos and images of high-ranking people, including the First Lady, Tiffany Trump, among others, and even fake Deepfake images of Donald Trump’s granddaughter. These practices, in turn, point to several of the vulnerabilities of the platform and raise serious questions with regard to regulatory oversight and ethical responsibility.
Exploiting Telegram’s Loopholes
Telegram’s “anonymous number” feature lets users create accounts without linking traceable phone numbers to them. While intended to protect user privacy, that feature has been weaponized by bad actors. Using anonymity as a shield, they distribute explicit content and deepfake images, thus continuing both privacy violations and digital exploitation. Deepfake technology has only increased this threat, where convincing but fabricated images and videos are created and spread with irreparable harm to the individuals’ reputation.
This abuse underlines a systemic problem in the design of Telegram: its lack of effective means for verification makes tracking down perpetrators or even accountability close to impossible—a safe haven for exploitative activities.
Telegram’s Complicity: A Case of Willful Blindness?
Despite these concerns, the platform has resisted implementing much in the way of safeguards— measures that would include using algorithms to detect harmful content beforehand or require mandatory identity verification. This is justified from the house of Telegram itself on grounds of commitment to privacy and free speech, while critics identify this stand as one allowing the service to avoid accountability rather than any genuine belief in those principles. Other social media rivals have shown that treading the tightrope in balancing the need for free speech, privacy, while being responsible, is possible—but Telegram just doesn’t get it.
Not satisfied, this negligence goes beyond a place of personal exploitation: multiple times, Telegram has shown to enable political interference and extremist propaganda, coordinated to spread disinformation. Among examples, it has been a platform for pro-Hamas propaganda, inflammatory content at the time of
European parliamentary elections, and amplifiers of extremist ideologies. Their execution through methods of virtual activity has caused destabilizations in societies and undermined democratically working authorities.
The Biden Administration’s Missed Opportunity
The inaction of the U.S. government only compounds the problem. With growing evidence of Telegram’s role in facilitating such activities, there has been zero effort from the Biden administration to take regulatory or punitive measures against the platform. While other nations have imposed sanctions, fines, or regulations on platforms that enable such harmful content, the U.S. response has been noticeably absent.
All this is pretty distressing for a site commanding the influence over public discourses that Telegram does have, and with such frank potential to harm individual persons and undermine democratic stability. To critics, this should have taken one of the great threats where the administration definitely has to show its firm desire for accountability through regulation in the case of international collaborations or other direct means on targeting Telegram.
Whereas some of the features in Telegram at one point were grounded in high ideals related to the protection of privacy, today the same features are perpetrating serious and ongoing harm against individuals while undermining democratic processes. Inability and unwillingness of the platform to fix this vulnerability and insufficient government follow-through in this direction allows these phenomena to go uninterrupted. By neglecting a solution for these issues, it clearly poses serious risks not just to the victims being targeted but further on extends to the international community that embraces democratic government.
The time for action is long overdue. It is past time to require stronger verification mechanisms to implement, malign content regulation, and the holding of the platforms to account for misuse—these are all very key in making the technology boons not exploitation and harm.