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Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov (Photo by AOP.Press/Corbis via Getty Images).

In recent days, following the arrest of CEO and founder Pavel Durov, attention has turned to the darker parts of his Telegram platform. For years, Telegram has been home to some of the worst content imaginable. Just this week, the Justice Department charged army soldier Seth Herrera with possession and transmission of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and for using unspecified AI tools to generate images of children. According to the criminal complaint filed against Herrera, he “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM and sent himself video files that include screaming children being raped.”

Law enforcement is now finding examples of Telegram groups where AI-generated CSAM is being shared on the platform, investigators told Forbes. One current federal child exploitation investigator, who was not authorized to talk on the record, said that there are “entire chatrooms dedicated to ‘nudify’ or ‘fakes’ where someone posts the non-exploitive image of the child so someone else in the group can ‘nudify’ it.” As Forbes previously reported, such Telegram “nudifier” bots are rampant on the app, and have been found marketed on YouTube before the site took them down.

Jim Cole, a recently-retired DHS Homeland Security Investigators (HSI) child exploitation investigator, said platforms like Telegram had long “prioritized their bottom line over the safety of their most........

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