I promise, I swear, Telegram moderators didn't know the word «shit». At least that is what the founder of the messaging service, Pavel Durov, assured, according to statements dating from December and consulted this Saturday, January 18 by AFP.
Amid numerous criminal activities that the Telegram application is accused of having facilitated, through negligence or laxity, Parisian investigating magistrates questioned the 40-year-old Russian billionaire last December about a public group called “Delivery shit weed Paris” which had not been spotted by the moderators of the application.
Durov was indicted at the end of August on a long list of charges, including “complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable an illicit transaction by an organized group” or even “import of a means of cryptology not exclusively providing authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration”.
But Durov defended himself against any negligence on the part of his teams, within which all would be “law-abiding”. Reason why the word «shit» is unknown to them. And the algorithm? It is simply not “not trained enough”, he decided.
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However, the group was well established on the platform. As the investigating magistrates tell it, he was simply discovered by the investigators while “a search using keywords linked to the sale of narcotics”. “How could a site with such an explicit name and such explicit photos be broadcast on Telegram?” asked the judges.
-Pavel Dourov's answer: “Even if our teams try to moderate this type of search [sur la drogue, ndlr] for several years, this research has 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.”
No knowledge of drugs
“There were moderators for France, so it’s their job to know the useful words and adapt the artificial intelligence?” continued the judges. But nothing to disconcert Pavel Durov, who replied: “The moderators we hired were like me, law-abiding people who had no knowledge of the drug scene.”
“Everyone who speaks French knows the word shit, even if they don’t consume cannabis,” the judges then responded. According to Pavel Durov, “this is certainly explained because the moderators were interested in other offenses and they did not have the extent of this problem. You are absolutely right that Telegram's AI algorithms were developed so that this type of content could be identified […]».
“Telegram did not have enough data to be able to teach the algorithm this type of content, particularly in French,” assures Durov. Since then, he has promised, “we have made more progress”.
