40,000 Dubious Telegram Channels Detected

The Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content (CDICC) in Iran, a working group under the supervision of the attorney general office, has detected 40,000 channels with controversial content in Telegram Messenger, the most widely used mobile communications app in Iran.

Assistant Prosecutor General Abdolsamad Khorramabadi said during a TV interview that 20,000 of the channels have either stopped their activities or changed their names and address links, and 12,000 other channels detected by Telegram managers as inappropriate have been shut down, news website Zoomit.ir reported.

The “inappropriate content” applies to pornography, anti-religious content, child molestation and sexual abuse, domestic violence and terrorism channels.

He said that over 8,000 of such channels are still actively propagating content against the norms of the society while the ICT Ministry has not taken any action against them.

This is while, according to recent reports, the Telecoms Ministry blocks more than 3,300 Telegram channels each week, but such channels pop up every day.

Khorramabadi has said “if the ICT Ministry can persuade the foreign companies to move their servers to Iran, we can handle this issue more efficiently.”