Monitoring Telegram for visual content

Step into the digital realm of Telegram, where public discourse converges with illicit activities posing threats to society. This case study illuminates the mechanisms provided by Web-IQ to monitor, intervene, and prevent crimes within this complex online environment.

Background

Hundreds of millions of people use Telegram for public and private conversations. Many Telegram channels and group chats are openly accessible and have several thousands of subscribers/members discussing current affairs. Due to its perceived anonymity and barriers to intervention, Telegram is also used for facilitating crime.

Many groups exist where illicit goods and substances are traded, child abuse material is shared, explicit photos are exposed without consent, extreme left and right wing propaganda, and many more (niche) topics.

Authorities looking after the safety of society need to have informational insights and the ability to act in order to prevent crimes like child abuse from happening.

Objectives

The first objective is for authorities to be aware of what is going on at the Telegram platform. By detecting trends and visualising developments, authorities are able to develop a strategy to keep society safe.

The second objective is to make sure that authorities can utilize all components associated with the available data – although Telegram is a messenger app, videos and images are a substantial part of the data that is shared within these group chats and channels.

The most important objective is to uncover key criminal players to prevent further crimes from taking place.

Solution

Web-IQ’s Telegram service enables users to scan their selection of relevant channels and groups.

The Voyager Intelligence Platform provides a large range of tools and analysis that make it possible to reach the objectives:

  • Set alerts for messages distributed via images by OCR-extracted text
  • Semantic Image Search is a text-to-image search to find specific objects, logos or people recorded in shared media
  • Automatic translations enables the analysis of content from channels and groups in your own language
  • Many other features for advanced analysis such as graphical visualisation and context widgets