The eSafety regulator has filed civil proceedings seeking up to A$54.6m, alleging Telegram hosted mass-shooting and Islamic State videos and ignored takedown demands. Telegram says it will fight.
Australia’s online safety regulator has taken Telegram to court, alleging the messaging app left terrorist and violent extremist videos on its platform after being told to remove them.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, filed civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court on 30 July, one of the most aggressive actions yet against the app over illegal content.
The material at the centre of the case is grim. eSafety says Telegram failed to take down footage of the 2022 white-supremacist mass shooting in Buffalo, of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack, and of Islamic State beheadings, among the most notorious extremist videos on the internet.
The regulator says it gave the company every chance. It began pressing Telegram to comply in March 2024, the filing states, but found the platform “non-responsive for months,” a pattern Inman Grant described as “a permissive hosting environment for terrorist content.”
The legal basis is Australia’s Online Safety Act. Passed in 2021, it requires platforms to remove illegal and pro-terrorism material once notified, and it is the same statute the regulator has leaned on elsewhere, echoing how Ofcom’s counterpart action put Telegram under scrutiny in Britain.
The money at stake is significant. Telegram faces a maximum penalty of about A$54.6 million, roughly $38 million, if the court finds against it, a figure that dwarfs the smaller fines eSafety has imposed for procedural failures.
This is not eSafety’s first clash with Telegram. The regulator previously fined the company over delays in answering questions about how it handles child-abuse and terror material, a dispute that foreshadowed the harder action now before the court.
Inman Grant framed it as a matter of basic obligation. “When platforms are alerted to terrorist content, they must act,” she said, casting the case less as a novel legal theory than as an effort to enforce a rule the company already knew.
Telegram is not backing down. “We reject these allegations and will contest them in court,” the company said, adding that it had blocked more than 150,000 “terrorist-related communities” in 2026 and pointing to its wider anti-terrorism work.
That defence is familiar. Telegram has long argued that it removes genuinely illegal content at scale while resisting broader demands, a stance that has put it in conflict with governments from Canberra to Brussels.
The timing is striking, because Telegram is fighting on several fronts at once. In the same week, Russia’s FSB charged its founder, Pavel Durov, with facilitating terrorism, an accusation Telegram called a pretext, leaving the company cast at once as too permissive in Australia and too defiant in Moscow.
Australia has become one of the most assertive regulators of online platforms anywhere. Its eSafety office has taken on X over content orders and is arming itself with tougher powers and larger fines as it polices everything from child safety to a world-first under-16 social media ban.
The extremist-content fight is older than the AI era, but it has not faded. Telegram’s loose moderation has drawn the accusation, from many governments, that it is friendlier to terrorists than it admits, a charge the company rejects while conceding it cannot catch everything.
Europe has written the harder line into law. The EU has required platforms to remove flagged terrorist content within an hour, part of a global shift toward treating hosting delays as violations in themselves rather than good-faith lags.
What Australia’s case will test is enforcement, not principle. Few dispute that beheading videos should come down; the question is whether a regulator can make a platform based abroad answer, in an Australian court, for how fast it acted.
The proceedings will now grind through the Federal Court. Telegram has promised a fight, eSafety has a maximum penalty to pursue, and the outcome will help decide whether Australia’s online-safety regime has real teeth or only a loud voice.
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