What are Telegram's responsibilities on revenge porn?

Anonymity is a double-edged sword. In countries with oppressive regimes, marked by the violation of privacy, the presence of encrypted chats and anonymous forms of expression can become the voice of freedom of expression. In the rest of the cases, however, it can become a kind of "cloak of invisibility" under which shyness disappears and any form of human decency is abandoned. This is the case of the most recent scandal that has involved a certain group here in Italy on Telegram, of which it is better not to make a name for not expanding its spread, which, according to an investigation by Wired, has turned out to be the largest network of revenge porn that our country has ever known, a real shame where precisely thanks to the anonymity men without dignity express the worst sides (and "worst" is a delicate euphemism) Sexuality: intimate photos of women and girls being shared and commented on, requests to blackmail and persecute the ex-girlfriend of this or that user and even frankly revolting questions concerning child abuse and sexual violence. Someone has tried to attribute part if not all responsibility for this phenomenon to Telegram itself, as chat totally protected from the controls of external authorities - but it is precisely this nature that makes it a valuable space for freedom of speech in the world, nor does the app lack policies related to the sharing of pornography. All the blame must instead fall on the users who take advantage of this freedom and on the human culture that makes this type of content acceptable for such a large portion of individuals.

The existence of these groups is nothing new: the same survey recently published by Wired is only the follow-up to a similar report dating back to last year. In the meantime, Telegram's administrators have cancelled the famous group, which in the peak period had 21 channels, with over 43,000 subscribers and about 30,000 messages per day. Unfortunately this chat group is insidious, as soon as you delete it here is born another, and the network of people who exploit it is so wide that you can be sure that it will continue to appear and reappear. As Wired points out, users more experienced in this type of pornography trade know how to maintain anonymity while there are less tech-wise user groups, tending middle-aged men, professionals and family fathers, who lack the basic technological knowledge to masquerade properly. In these hours, many voices are rising against the phenomenon – the most notable of which is that of Fedez who three days ago reported the group to the Postal Police after a series of reports on Twitter. However, the explosion on Telegram of this shameful phenomenon has raised questions on which it is best to clarify.

It would be easy at this juncture to demonize, rather than the users, the platform itself. After all, it is Telegram that thanks to its end-to-end encryption system provides this large group of people with a space in which to give vent to their most infamous impulses. But blaming Telegram for the spread of this content is tantamount to blaming the trees if a forest fire breaks out. There's always someone setting the fire. Encryption and anonymity could be and are great tools to promote freedom of speech, it is the culture of users the real breeding ground for the appearance of such shameful phenomena. In journalism, a trite but expressive word is often used to refer to episodes of sexual abuse, "herd", which rightly emphasizes the bestiality of the dynamics developed within certain contexts. It is the herd of these men to blame if occurrences like the current one occur, and certainly not a medium like Telegram that indeed in its being much more hardcore in the defense of the privacy of its users, being free of advertising and presenting itself as a free zone for the exchange of any content should even be praised for integrity.

By comparing the encryption systems of Telegram and WhatsApp, you can not help but notice how WhatsApp, while protecting the data of its users from online hackers, makes them available to its owner, namely Facebook, which has among other things unified the accounts of its users to cross-reference the data collected on them. Facebook, Instagram and all other social networks, at the end of the day, despite their surely more politically-correct appearance, continuously collect data and localizations, storing it on company servers and piloting the type of content that their user accesses, manipulating tastes and advertising. Telegram, on the other hand, leverages a relocated network of cloud servers that literally shreds data in the cloud of different countries making their recovery very difficult. Right in the face of extreme situations such as the current revenge porn affair, one must maintain one's rationality more firmly, not immediately fall into the easy indignation of social media and above all do not shout at scandal with superficiality. If one day we want to be able to approach technology properly, it will serve well-founded and safe notions and not to point it as the easy culprit of all the evils of the world.