An investigation identifies a dozen Telegram groups targeting women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups with doxxing, harassment, and more
A WIRED investigation goes inside the Telegram groups targeting women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” … Mastodon: @tansy@wandering.shop . X: @wired , @sarahjcamm , @sarahjcamm , and @sarahjcamm Mastodon: Tansy Hoskins / @tansy@wandering.shop : My friend wrote this important but disturbing article on the ‘manosphere’ Telegram groups that are a breeding ground for misogynistic, racist, sexual digital abuse of women: — https://www.wired.com/... X: @wired : A WIRED investigation goes inside the Telegram groups targeting women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups on Facebook with doxing, harassment, and sharing of nonconsensual intimate images. https://www.wired.com/... Sarah Cammarata / @sarahjcamm : Maybe you've heard about the “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook groups. For @WIRED, I went inside the toxic Telegram groups targeting women in retaliation for their AWDTSG posts with doxing, harassment, and sharing of nonconsensual intimate images. https://www.wired.com/... Sarah Cammarata / @sarahjcamm : We analyzed thousands of messages in one of the Telegram groups. Over a 24 hour period, we observed users systematically tracking, doxing, and degrading women (mostly in the UK) circulating nonconsensual images, phone numbers, usernames, and location data. https://www.wired.com/... Sarah Cammarata / @sarahjcamm : “In the eyes of some of these men, this is a necessary act of defense against a kind of hostile feminism that they believe is out to ruin their lives,” says @carljackmiller, cofounder of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The investigation follows earlier reporting on AWDTSG’s scale and internal debate over whether its dating-safety model can itself cause harm, including coverage of the Facebook groups’ reported 3.5 million members. It adds a cross-platform retaliation layer: participation in one service’s community can become material for abuse in another service’s private groups.
It also fits a longer record of nonconsensual-image sharing and personal-data trafficking online, from a now-deleted subreddit that traded women’s explicit images and private details to Telegram channels used for coordinated abuse. The significance is the apparent systematic targeting of a defined set of women rather than isolated harassment.
First-order effects
- Women identified from AWDTSG participation face immediate exposure to doxxing, degrading messages, and circulation of intimate images and personal data, raising the personal cost of joining or posting in the Facebook groups.
- Telegram is directly confronted with evidence from WIRED’s message analysis of a dozen groups using its service to organize and distribute abusive material; Facebook’s AWDTSG communities are the source pool from which targets are identified.
Second-order effects
- AWDTSG participants and moderators may limit profile details, screenshots, and other identifying information to reduce cross-platform targeting, potentially constraining the groups’ ability to share dating-safety information.
- The case increases pressure for Facebook and Telegram to treat abuse reports as a linked workflow rather than as separate platform incidents, especially where public or semi-public posts are repackaged into private-group harassment.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, trust-and-safety will increasingly turn on the cross-border Telegram abuse networks documented in later reporting and on whether platforms can disrupt the movement of identity data between services, not merely remove individual posts.
- The episode points to consent architecture as a product and governance issue: information shared for a bounded community purpose can be repurposed into targeted abuse when visibility, identity, and redistribution controls do not travel with it.
The trend: Online safety is shifting from single-platform content moderation toward managing how personal data and intimate material are recombined across interconnected services.