The eSafety Commissioner has filed civil penalty proceedings against Telegram in the Federal Court, alleging the messaging service left terrorist material on its platform after Australian users reported it. The case was filed on Thursday. The maximum penalty is $54.6 million.
The material named in the claim includes footage of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, the May 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, and Islamic State execution videos. Australian users reported twelve posts. eSafety says ten of them were still live after Telegram was notified, that no action was taken against the accounts behind them, and that some of the material stayed up for close to three months.
It is the first time the regulator has taken a provider to court under the Relevant Electronic Services Standard, which took effect last year under the Online Safety Act 2021. The Standard requires providers to prevent, detect, deter and disrupt unlawful material on their services. eSafety first wrote to Telegram about those obligations in March 2024 and has said the company was non-responsive for months afterwards.
“No platform is above the law, and this action demonstrates that eSafety will not hesitate to use the full range of its powers to protect Australians," the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said. She has also said that if a court orders a penalty and Telegram does not pay it, she will seek to have the app blocked in Australia.”
Telegram rejects the allegations. The company says it blocked more than 150,000 terrorist-related communities during 2026 and has taken down more than 200 million pieces of terrorist content. Those are the company's own figures and they cover its global operation, not the twelve posts in the claim.
The conduct described in the claim is already unlawful here. Sharing violent extremist material is an offence under the Criminal Code, and the abhorrent violent material provisions passed three weeks after Christchurch require platforms to remove that content expeditiously or face penalties running to 10 per cent of annual turnover for a corporation. Those provisions are enforced by police and prosecutors. eSafety is testing a parallel route: a civil standard made by the regulator, with penalties set by a court on the regulator's application.
Telegram is based in Dubai. Whether an Australian civil penalty can be collected from a company operating entirely offshore is the question the case puts to the Federal Court, and it is the same question sitting behind the blocking threat. A penalty is directed at the company. Blocking the app reaches everyone in Australia who uses it.
eSafety has separate enforcement proceedings on foot against X. The office also administers the ban on Australians under 16 holding social media accounts, which took effect in December.
The Standard has been in force for about a year and no court has ruled on it. What the Federal Court decides here becomes the reference point for every other service the Standard covers.
