this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

First off, let me just say that I am not quite sure how telegram works. So far I know it’s just a far saver WhatsApp that guarantees that your info isn’t being sold.

None of that is true. Telegram is Open Source, but is not safer than WhatsApp in any way. Telegram messages are not e2ee by default, and group chats can not be e2ee, unlike Whatsapp which encrypts all messages end-to-end, always.

There's no real safeguard in place to prevent telegram from selling your data. It probably isn't doing it for now, it claims that it doesn't sell your data, but so does facebook. Their privacy policies aren't that different. Telegram does have your data, it could sell your data, it just doesn't. Note that telegram is not a nonprofit.

Second, most of my issues with your ideas of censoring content is meant in a more general sense.

I'm not calling for "more general" censorship, I've been quite specific.

You mean apart from the fact they can just hop over to some other platform?

How is that not an inconvenience? Moving your entire. organization, finding a platform that won't ban you, finding a platform that will host unlimited beheading videos at high resolution, finding a platform with the same broadcast feature so they can spread propaganda to hundreds of millions of people, finding that all for free... What part of that is just as convenient as continuing to do what they're doing?

Also I am not quite sure how you imagine telegram to actually do something against terrorists while also guaranteeing the privacy aspect of the service they are providing.

Telegram is literally already aware of which accounts belong to Hamas, Pavel Durov has publicly commented on why he doesn't feel like Hamas is a problem, this is not a question of discovering terrorism on the platform, this is a question of figuring out what to do about it.

That’s literally their whole thing, privacy.

Privacy is aggressively not a thing Telegram is about. You seem to have fallen for some of their weird marketing. The only things about Telegram that might preserve your privacy are the option to sign up anonymously (a lot of messaging apps have this, and it's not necessarily a good thing), and the fact that it isn't owned by facebook (most messaging apps aren't).

This is especially true of broadcast channels, which any schmuck can view without installing the app or having an account at all.

I am not even going to bother with all these other straw man fallacies. If you can’t have a civil discussion without putting words in my mouth and twisting the meaning of them we are done here.

But that's what I'm talking about. I said Telegram shouldn't provide terrorists with a means to share videos of beheadings, and you have a problem with the freedom-related implications of that, I'm really not sure what your point was.