Monsters among us: Malaysians are sharing child porn, rape videos on Telegram

KUALA LUMPUR — In a grainy, 52-second video titled “Daddy and me at 6”, a man is seen having sex with a young girl. Captions such as "slamming a 6 year-old” and “my daughter at 5” appear throughout the video, although the faces of both the girl and the man cannot be seen.

In another video, three Asian-looking pre-pubescent girls are seen huddled together in a room on what appears to be a bed, wherein the camera zooms in on the three girls who are sitting on the bed naked, showing their chests and private parts.

Given Malaysia’s zero tolerance policy when it comes to porn websites, you would think that these videos of child porn are only accessible on the so-called dark web — a hard to access part of the Internet often used for illegal activity.

Wrong. Many local, Malay-speaking groups and channels on pro-privacy encrypted messaging app Telegram have already downloaded them.

After a recent exposé by social activist Syed Azmi Alhabshi about a local paedophile group on Telegram, Malay Mail Online decided to investigate if there were Malaysians who were actively using the app to source and access child porn.

Videos like the ones described above and also those depicting girls and women being raped were quite easily available — all you need is a Telegram account and the links of the channels and groups which people use to share these videos.

ACCESSIBILITY AND PRIVACY

In just a few hours, Malay Mail Online found a dozen local porn channels and groups that contained thousands of explicit images and videos of adult women, teenage schoolgirls in uniforms, as well as child pornography and what appears to be videos of actual sexual assaults as opposed to staged “rape” in adult entertainment.

Most of the members appear to be Malaysians and many of the users conversed in Malay. Those depicted in several pornographic videos and pictures, which seem to be amateur porn, also appear to be Malay.

It is rather easy to join porn groups or channels on Telegram. Groups are limited up to 5,000 members, whereas channels are used to broadcast messages publicly to an unlimited audience.

One of the sex channels that we found has more than 11,000 members. Many of the local porn groups on Telegram have the maximum 5,000 members.

Collections of images, videos and audio clips are listed on the group’s or channel’s information page.

There are also search functions to look for particular messages or files. Many of the Telegram porn groups or channels have thousands of photos and videos, with one channel having more than 19,000 video files at the time of writing.

Telegram users enjoy privacy as they cannot see each other’s phone numbers, unless one already has a number previously saved as a contact.

Telegram also allows users to send end-to-end encrypted messages, which means that only the sender and receiver can read them, preventing a third party, including the authorities, from intercepting such messages.

But a November 2015 report by Motherboard from American-Canadian media company Vice Media quoted experts who said the app may not be as secure as previously believed, noting for example that the encrypted chat function is not enabled by default.

EXPLOITATION/RAPE OF YOUNG GIRLS

Many of the videos found on the Telegram channels and groups featured the exploitation and sexual abuse of young girls and women, with some of them seen screaming, crying and repeatedly pleading with the abuser.

One girl is heard screaming “Sakit, nak balik” (Painful, I want to go home) to which one of the men replies: “Sakit? Sat lagi kita pi hospital na.” (In pain? We’ll take you to the hospital later). Her cries and screams are then drowned by laughter. The faces of the perpetrators cannot be seen.

All the videos range from between 1.5MB to 3MBs in size and can be easily downloaded and shared via a mobile phone or tablet. In fact, Telegram allows a user to share any file of any format up to 1.5GB in size.

WHAT CAN LOCAL AUTHORITIES DO?

Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed said it will be difficult for the police to identify the perpetrators or victims as they may not be able to trace a particular Telegram account and the forwarding of contentious materials means the source is unknown.

“You cannot block porn on social media like Telegram unless you block total access to the country.

The only way is if the service provider like Telegram blocks it themselves, but freedom of speech is an issue,” Mr Nur Jazlan told Malay Mail Online.

“Police are resource limited and are not able to investigate every single offence effectively. The government can make a request through the Communications Ministry, but up to Telegram to take action,” he added.

US site TechCrunch reported last September that Telegram has blocked porn channels and bots in Iran for “business” reasons. Last November, the app also blocked 78 Islamic State-related channels shortly after the Paris attacks by the terror group that killed 129 people.

The TechCrunch report also quoted Telegram founder and owner Pavel Durov as saying that he did not want his company to be perceived as a “source for porn.”

“We’re not big fans of porn. We don’t want Telegram to be perceived as a source of porn. And so we do block this kind of stuff,” he was quoted saying.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said that while it does not monitor messaging apps, it would act based on complaints, or if requested to do so by the police on a case-by-case basis.

“This includes contacting messaging application providers to remove contents that have breached Malaysian laws,” MCMC told Malay Mail Online.

The MCMC recently set up a special committee to probe Syed Azmi’s claim of a local paedophile group using Telegram for their activities.

MCMC Enforcement and Investigations Department head Mai Zairani Zainal Abidin said last week the Special Committee on Eradicating Social Media Abuse, comprising the commission, the Attorney-General’s Chamber and the police, was investigating the matter.

Ms Mai Zairani said cases involving paedophiles were normally investigated by the police, while MCMC would conduct forensic investigations on the platform they use to communicate.

She said the commission received 62 complaints on abuse of social media between January and May this year, an increase of 63 per cent from the corresponding period last year. MALAY MAIL ONLINE