for an astonishing reason, a “weed and shit delivery” group was able to thrive on Telegram

This is a more than comical statement. Placed under judicial supervision since last summer, the CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was questioned by the judges about a public group called “Delivery shit weed Paris”. He responded that his “law-abiding” moderators did not know the word “shit,” and that his algorithms were not trained enoughaccording to statements obtained this Saturday January 18, 2025 by AFP.

“The moderators didn't know the words 'weed' and 'shit'

Having a presence on the platform, the group was simply discovered by the investigators by “a search using keywords linked to the sale of narcotics”tell the investigating magistrates. “How could a site with such an explicit name and such explicit photos be broadcast on Telegram,” the judges asked Pavel Durov.

According to the founder of Telegram, his teams have “tried to moderate this type of search (on drugs) for several years”, but they have mainly focused “on markets and in languages ​​where Telegram is the most popular. France was not part of this list. As soon as we learned about it, we improved a lot,” explains Pavel Durov.

An explanation which, however, has not convinced anyone who wonders about the role of moderators and how it is possible that they do not know the words “beuh and shit”, although they are very widespread in France. “It’s their job to know useful words and adapt artificial intelligence (AI)? », affirm the judges.

Pavel Durov would have once again retorted that his “moderators […] did not have the extent of this problem and that Telegram did not not enough data to be able to teach the algorithm this type of contentparticularly in French.

WITH AFP

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