Australia begins legal action against Telegram over alleged pro-terror material

By Alasdair Pal

The office of the eSafety Commissioner said it had begun action after Telegram failed to remove videos of terrorist executions and mass shootings.

“This case concerns content linked to some of the most notorious acts of known extremist violence in recent history, including material associated with the Christchurch and Buffalo terror attacks,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.

“We allege that this content remained accessible on the service long after Telegram had been put on notice.”

Failure to comply with Australia’s codes and standards could result in civil penalties of up to A$54.6 million ($38 million), the statement said.

“We reject these allegations and will contest them in court,” a spokesperson for Telegram said in response to a request for comment.

Telegram’s anti-terrorism efforts are well-documented, the spokesperson added, with thousands of extremist communities blocked by the platform in 2026 alone.

In a court filing, eSafety said Australian Telegram users reported complaining to the platform about seeing 12 posts containing pro-terror content from July to October 2025, including three which contained known terrorist content.

But the platform failed to take down 10 of the posts or suspend or block the accounts that posted the material, the filing added.

Telegram is one of the world’s most downloaded apps, with over 1 billion monthly active users, according to the company.

Its founder, Russian-born Pavel Durov, left Russia in 2014, moving himself and the company to Dubai in 2017.

The platform has become a critical source of information on Russia’s war in Ukraine and is used widely by officials in Moscow and Kyiv.

Russia on Wednesday charged Durov with facilitating terrorist activity, alleging that the app was being used by Ukrainian spies to organise attacks inside Russia.

($1 = 1.4366 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal and Byron Kaye in Sydney; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Stephen Coates)