Comment by devjab

1 year ago

I can give you some insight into why EU law enforcement and politicians dislike telegram. It’s not because they can’t snoop on you, it’s because Telegram fails to comply with moderation requests for channels where illegal content is shared.

We had a nice scandal of sorts here in Denmark where a bunch of young men shared pictures of young women without consent. If you’re old enough to remember those old “rate this girl” web pages from the 90ies you’ll know what the pictures were used for. Basically it was a huge database on hot girls in Denmark and where they went to school. Today around 1000 young men have that on their permanent record as Facebook worked with law enforcement to catch the criminals. Telegram doesn’t do that. This was even a little more innocent that it may sound, considering the men were at least aged similar to the women they were sharing pictures of. Disgusting and illegal, but Telegram houses far worse and refuses to deal with it.

I know a lot of tech minded people are up in arms over this, but it’s really mainly about not wanting an unmoderated social network. Not because big brother is angry, but because people use it to organise bullying, share revenge porn, sell drugs and far, far, worse. There is also political factions within the EU who rants to kill encryption (though they were severely weakened when the brits left), but the anger against SoMe platforms is much more “European”. In that we (and I say this as the EU culture in general, not as in 100% of us) tend to view the people who enable bad behaviour as being participating in that behaviour. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have been sort of protected by being early movers with mass adoption. Being American companies probably helps as well considering EU / US relations. Telegram never had such advantages, and is further disadvantaged by how its almost exclusively used for crime in Western Europe.

Obviously banning the platform won’t help. There will just be another platform. But then, we’ve also been losing a drug war for 50+ years even though we can’t even keep drugs out of our prisons.

4 comments

devjab

Reply
yard2010  1 year ago

Haha Facebook worked with law enforcement to catch criminals. Who works with law enforcement to catch Facebook?

sam_lowry_  1 year ago

> you’ll know what the pictures were used for.

Fapping on? And what's the problem with that, exactly?

  • devjab  1 year ago

    It’s illegal to share pictures without consent. Especially if it’s nudes. On top of that it was the equivalent of high schoolers so much of it was 15-17 year olds. Minors.

    I believe there was a public discussion on whether putting sharing of child pornography on a 15-19 year olds permanent record was the right thing to do in the context. Considering they are all similarly aged and are allowed to have sex and share nudes with consent. I can’t remember how it went, it wasn’t something I followed very closely.