The videos are also used to advertise prostitution, recruit vulnerable people, and normalise exploitation and sex trafficking.
A civic tech organisation, Citizens' Gavel has instituted a fundamental rights enforcement action before the Federal High Court of Nigeria against messaging platform, Telegram, over the platform's failure to protect Nigerian users from sexual exploitation and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.
The legal action follows a disturbing investigation by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), published on its fact-checking platform DUBAWA, which found 86 Telegram channels with over 16,000 active users across several Nigerian states and university communities where intimate videos of women are obtained non-consensually.
The videos are also used to advertise prostitution, recruit vulnerable people, and normalise exploitation and sex trafficking.
The findings of this investigation are consistent with what Citizens' Gavel has witnessed firsthand through Gbami, its sexual and gender-based abuse response arm, which has directly handled cases of women and girls whose intimate content have been obtained through deception, where perpetrators assumed false identities, cultivated trust, and manufactured emotional intimacy until victims, believing themselves in a private and caring relationship, shared images that were then sold to strangers across multiple marketplaces on the platform.
