Australia's eSafety Commissioner has initiated civil penalty proceedings against Telegram in the Federal Court, seeking fines of up to A$54.6 million ($38 million) over allegations that the platform failed to detect and remove terrorist material.

The filing on Thursday followed a year-long investigation. The regulator alleges that Telegram permitted known "pro-terror material" to remain accessible, including footage of the live-streamed 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket attack, which reportedly stayed on the platform for nearly three months. The complaint also asserts that Telegram's terms of service did not comprehensively prohibit pro-terror content across all sections of the application. The Christchurch footage in particular became a flashpoint for global content moderation reform efforts after the 2019 attack, which killed 51 people and was live-streamed on Facebook before spreading rapidly across multiple platforms, prompting the Christchurch Call — a global pledge now endorsed by more than 130 governments, tech companies, and organizations to eliminate terrorist content online.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told BBC News that the platform maintained a "permissive environment" where extremist content was "very easy to find," adding that such material "only serves to desensitise, to normalise and to sometimes radicalise" users. She also noted that Telegram had been "sometimes used to plan attacks."

Inman Grant indicated that the regulator has the authority to request the Federal Court to order the cessation of Telegram's service in Australia, though she acknowledged these powers have never been exercised. "We've never used those powers. We'll see how this all plays out," she said. Australia's Online Safety Act, passed in 2021, is regarded as one of the most assertive content regulation frameworks in the democratic world, giving the eSafety office powers that few comparable regulators possess — including the ability to issue takedown notices with strict compliance deadlines and pursue civil penalties scaled to a platform's global revenue.

The eSafety Commissioner's office had previously issued Telegram an infringement notice of nearly $1 million in February last year for a five-month delay in responding to questions about terrorist and child sexual exploitation material. Telegram called that penalty "unfair and disproportionate" and stated it would appeal. The Guardian also covered the earlier enforcement action.

Legal Pressure Across Multiple Jurisdictions

The Australian filing came one day after Russia's FSB charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism and placed him on an international wanted list, alleging the platform failed to remove channels used by Ukrainian intelligence and extremist groups. If convicted, Durov faces up to life in prison.

Durov was separately indicted in France in 2024 over drug trafficking, organized fraud, and child sexual abuse material on Telegram, and was released under judicial supervision. Durov denies wrongdoing and called the French case "legally and logically absurd." The simultaneous actions by Australia, Russia, and France place Telegram under an unusually broad legal siege across jurisdictions with starkly different legal traditions and political motivations — even as the platforms' defenders, including digital rights groups, have warned that some of the enforcement efforts risk conflating moderation failures with liability for user speech.

A Telegram spokesperson told the BBC that the platform's "extensive" anti-terrorism efforts were "well documented," stating: "We reject these allegations and will contest them in court."

The case marks a significant test of Australia's 2021 law requiring platforms to keep pro-terror material off their networks. It follows the country's ban on social media for users under 16, a measure spearheaded by Inman Grant. The outcome of the Federal Court proceedings is likely to be closely watched by other national regulators — including the EU under its Digital Services Act and the UK under its Online Safety Act — that are weighing how far they can push platforms like Telegram, which operates with a mix of public channels and encrypted private chats that complicate both detection and enforcement.