24-year-old Liyah Mai found out that explicit images and videos of her had been leaked online after her friends sent her screenshots of the images circulating within a group chat on Telegram. “People were also commenting about it on my TikTok,” Mai says. Not only were these Telegram users sharing intimate photos of Mai – they were also sharing screenshots of pictures from her Instagram account and asking if anyone else in the group had slept with her before. “It was bizarre,” she says.

Mai isn’t alone. Last week, reports circulated on X and TikTok about group chats on Telegram where men were doxxing women, spreading vindictive lies about them, and sharing revenge porn. Speaking to Dazed, Sophie Mortimer, manager of the Revenge Porn Helpline, says that the charity has received “multiple reports” concerning groups on Telegram sharing non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of hundreds of women and girls. “Where possible we have reported the images to Telegram, however, they have been unresponsive to these reports.” (Telegram did not respond to Dazed’s request for comment either.)

“It made me feel really upset to think that people would go out of their way to do this,” Mai says. “Not only to me, but to younger girls too. I heard there were nudes of girls as young as 15 being shared. It’s disgusting.” Mortimer has also heard reports that “some of the groups contain images of children”, and stresses that this is “classified as illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the UK.” She says the Revenge Porn Hotline is working with their partners at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK authority, to report this content. Relatedly, it recently came to light that Telegram has repeatedly refused to join international programmes aimed at detecting and removing child abuse material online.

Many of these Telegram chats are titled ‘Are we dating the same girl?’, prompting comparisons to the ‘Are we dating the same guy?’ Facebook groups used by women across the world. These Facebook groups largely comprise women looking to check if the person they’re dating is a fuckboy or, in extreme instances, an abuser. Though there is still debate about whether these sorts of groups are ethical, they are at least stringently moderated: “remarks about appearances are not allowed, neither is hate speech, bullying, sharing sensitive information or dispersing screenshots of posts from within the group,” Dazed reported in 2023. By contrast, ‘Are we dating the same girl?’ Telegram groups are a veritable wild west.

Telegram has been criticised for its sloppy approach to content moderation for years, with the platform becoming a cesspit of drug and human trafficking, fraud, and political extremism (last summer it came under fire for allowing far-right rioters in the UK to organise and consume inflammatory disinformation). The app only employs 50 full-time moderators – pitifully few given the platform boasts around 950 million monthly users (by contast, TikTok claims to have a 40,000-strong content moderation team).

With such a lax attitude to moderation, it’s unsurprising that Telegram has long had a revenge porn problem: back in 2022 the BBC reported that intimate photos of women were “being shared to harass, shame and blackmail them on a massive scale” on the platform. Mortimer stresses that this isn’t the first time they’ve been alerted to revenge porn circulating on Telegram either. “The Revenge Porn Helpline regularly receives reports regarding NCII on Telegram and we would encourage the platform to engage with us to remove this material quickly as well as join the StopNCII.org initiative to prevent the sharing of this abusive content.”

It made me feel really upset to think that people would go out of their way to do this

Disturbingly, despite a slew of new laws which criminalise distributing intimate images with the intent of causing embarrassment or distress, reports of revenge porn are on the rise: in 2023, the Revenge Porn Helpline released new data which illustrated a 106 per cent increase in reports compared to the previous year. It’s unsurprising that many still share revenge porn despite it becoming illegal in 2015: research from women’s charity Refuge found that just 4 per cent of all revenge porn offences recorded across 24 police forces from January 2019 to July 2022 resulted in the alleged offender being charged or summonsed.

While Mai says she hopes any underage girls whose photos have been shared on Telegram have reported the crime to the police, she has chosen not to. Given the abysmally low conviction rate, her reluctance is entirely understandable. “I’m not sure there’s much they could do,” she says, adding that she doubts the police could find the perpetrators given the anonymity Telegram affords its users.

Being the victim of intimate image abuse can cause PTSD, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and many reports indicate that having explicit photos of yourself shared without your consent can have the same post-assault symptoms as ‘face-to-face’ sexual violence. With this in mind, it’s vital that steps are taken to tackle the rise of revenge porn: in the long-term, it’s likely this will involve stamping out misogyny (especially the institutionalised misogyny within the police) and preventing young men from becoming radicalised by figures like Andrew Tate.

In the meantime, though, platforms should be carrying out robust content moderation to ensure they’re not enabling users to perpetuate intimate image abuse. While some of the revenge porn group chats on Telegram have now been shut down, others remain, and it’s evident this is a deep-seated issue which will require more than just a haphazard whack-a-mole approach. “I think Telegram in general should be looked into and regulated more. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me, and it doesn’t seem like it’ll stop anytime soon,” Mai says. “The whole app needs to be shut down in my opinion.”

If you have been affected by threats to share intimate images or films, or have been a victim of revenge porn, you can access advice and support by calling the UK Revenge Porn Helpline on 0345 6000 459.