The collective panic and Luddism about Telegram in Germany is really scary. I watch Tagesschau (probably most respected news show) every evening. Any time Telegram is mentioned it's always being attacked, as if it's only purpose was to enable crime and terrorism.
say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker". It may not be the main use of telegram but if you are a member of the public only seeing these kind of stickers everywhere would make me worry as well.
It's not like you need Telegram to buy Drugs in Hamburg. There are places like the U-Bahn Sternschanze or the Hafentreppe where Dealers have been continuously offering light and hard drugs for over a decade with an uptime that puts FAANG SLAs to shame. They occasionally get raided whenever the police wants to have their pictures in the local papers but it's not like there is anything you could get via Telegram that you couldn't get through a five minute walk. The only difference is that the Dealers protect their turf, so Telegram opens new avenues for competing dealers to enter the market.
I have seen this argument over and over but there is a power law and authorities just need to cut off the head off the probability distribution. Centralized messengers are no hydra.
Just wait until German police discovers a thing called SMS. Right now, we are lucky that Fax is still a thing in Germany, and the whole internet thing is just a "Neuland" (new land), as ex-chancellor Merkel admitted.
Oh yes, because local telecommunication companies delivering SMS using archaic, non-end-to-end encrypted protocols are TOTALLY more resilient to government censorship than Telegram :-P
Look, when it comes to SMS and craigslist-style things etc. I bet they will want to just keep them up so they can act as a dragnet for the fools who use them to organize criminal activity.
I'm not telling that SMS is secure. S stands for short, not secure. But given how easy it is to fake and forge SMS, at least one can have a plausible deniability if their SMS got intercepted and read.
> So its okay for people to leak addresses of politicians and call on other to kill them?
To leak their addresses? Yes. To call on killing them? No.
Knowing where your elected (and/or unelected) officials live is very useful for civic purposes. It helps to identify various forms of corruption.
Case in point: when I lived in Finland, our local municipality had 6 snowploughs. Only five of them were ever really in used for clearing out roads. During the long winters, the last one was essentially parked, with a person inside, next to a particular neighbourhood. It only cleared out the roads in that neighbourhood, and the roads directly connecting to it. That neighbourhood housed the chair and two other members of the town council.
Being able to associate uneven allocation of public funds and the home addresses of those deciding how the allocation is done is useful, and I claim, even necessary.
Is all organization you can think about organizing to kill someone?
People have the right to organize themselves, regardless of their political views, whether it is a telegram group about organizing a school festival, or demonstration about a topic you agree or not agree about.
You can also ask to ban phones because people can use them to organize a murder. Or ban a postal service, since postal mail can also be used for bad purpose.
That argument is not honest. There already are laws against doxing and threats. We don't need to censor a whole platform because of that. Especially if it's done just so we can conveniently muzzle groups that just want to protest against masks, vaccines, or lockdowns.
But that's the point - Telegram refuses to honor these laws. There are court rulings demanding Telegram to remove content, which Telegram ignores, hence the threats of banning the entire platform.
It probably do that and also pay its fines exemplary but at the end of the day it is a monopolistic network, a privacy abuser, a compulsive liar, a opinion manipulator and a big threat to democracy and society.
To the government exerting control over it's citizens is far more important than protecting it's citizens rights and well-being. Facebook knows that and just play the game and at the end of the day Zuckerberg can do whatever he want if he saves politicians faces.
Okay you have clearly no clue what you are talking about.
Its not about "querdenker" putting there bullshit on and promoting there products.
It's about the far right and people are getting more aggressive every day and writing death threats and leaking addresses and a lot of nasty shit.
It's not about selling your homeopathic sugar pills.
It's not about stupid people spreading fake news.
It's about people calling other people to kill other people.
And you know that because? Have you seen those things yourself?
Will they also shut down email, I'm sure a lot of death threats are sent via that?
Even if a few crazy people are into such things, it doesn't mean they have a huge impact. You can use Telegram just fine without ever seeing anything of it.
Perhaps the problem is in CENTRALIZED (or federated) addressing systems like the postal mail or DNS?
Think about it … you wouldn’t get SPAM emails and calls or DDOS atacks if you only gave out capabilities to contact you to your existing contacts, and gave close contacts the ability to refer people to you, and if one friend abused their capability of handing out such invites, then you invalidate all their future invites.
Same with the mail. Why should people easily know your address? Oh yeah… because it is published on some LARGE CENTRALIZED SITE UNENCRYPTED. Okay, so if unencrypted information about hard-to-change things such as your physical address gets out, then yes it is game over since geographic coordinates are static and moving is expensive.
But online, this is not the case. The neywork can remap things periodically. Or you can just rejoin at a different address / number and update all your contacts (except the traitors lol).
Look, the country’s post office could even have such an addressing scheme that shifts the internal addresses and maps to physical addresses only on a need to know basis for physical mail delivery. And again… who delivers your mail? A CENTRALIZED mail service? If you had couriers employed by many private companies, you’d just give them info on a need to know basis yourself, and they woild have a hard time combining it into one giant database.
You see, most of the time some DDOS attack happens on a person or website it is because somewhere, some giant centralized site published your address on some centralized routing scheme.
And taking it further … most wars and large scale violence happens because people joined forces to attack some other group of people. Ultimately that is what we have to solve, to make it exponentially harder to organize large groups for “unapproved” uses (there can be a whitelist of approved uses such as 1. agreeing on industrial standards, and 2. saving the world from a threat, whether a virus, an asteroid, rising seas or whatever).
If you’re trying to join forces for anything else, you’re probably doing it at the expense of others and they will join forces too (eg cartels of doctors vs single payer health insurance).
People need to join forces to battle corrupt tax policy or corrupt laws that benefit one politician or businessman at the expense of a whole county's or even country's worth of taxpayers.
People need to join forces to organise labour unions to have any equal negotiating power against their employer.
People not being allowed to organise is the wet dream of corrupt autocratic politicians and business owners around the world (which is also why China or Russia have such tight controls and surveillance over their respective messaging app ecosystems).
Everything you mentioned can be described as “people need to join forces to battle other people who have previously joined forces”.
Do you see the issue here? It just escalates further.
“Russia” and “China” are entire countries with massively centralized governments and decision making. At that point your best bet is to decentralize decision making to “democracy” — good luck w that.
But the mailman who carried the coordinating communications is not guilty of participating in that coordination, doesn't open and read the mail, and the postal service is not shut down when the activity is discovered.
Perhaps some would say "Ah but it's possible to intercept and open someone's mail, and that's the difference!"
Probably with a warrant an individual's mail can be intercepted, but if the letter inside were written in code, then tbats as far as that goes. It's not up to the postal service to break the code or prevent communication in code. It's impossible anyway since code doesn't have to look like code.
In this case maybe Telegram is like if the postal service also wrote the code but really the code is more like the envelope. The a alogies get fuzzy of course. Is the envelope maybe really tcp/ip? or is that the road? Or is the road the fiberoptic cable?
You have to go back to just examining the essential facts and implications:
It has never been illegal to send a letter with envelopes that block light or expose tampering, and has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code. Anyone could write an impossible law, but it would still be impossible. Any communication at all no matter what it looks like, could be code.
So there is no defensible/actionable way to have a problem with either a letter carrier, or the act of writing a letter in code. And those are the two things Telegram does or facilitates, and so do countless other services and channels.
> has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code
This is a very sweeping statement that is false for lots of places and times; while Germany is at the supportive end of encryption various other EU countries have mandatory key disclosure to law enforcement. Even in the US it's illegal to make encrypted radio transmissions on certain bands.
It is a poor argument to make the it would be impossible for Germany to criminalize encrypted communication. They can do it, even if it would be ineffective and widely subverted.
The use of a code can neither be proven nor disproven.
If you write a letter, and there is no way to prove that it is in code, or not in code, then there is no way to make it either explicitly legal or explicitly illegal. You could only do so arbitrarily which is invalid.
I already acknowledged that this does not stop anyone from writing a law that says anything. But it's the same as writing a law that pi is 3 from now on.
There's a difference between the right for you and a few others to set up a group when you already know each other, and the right for you to search for those others by interest.
Technically: Private groups are different from groups that are publicly searchable by or or more of name/blurb/message content.
And this is in Germany. They have seen extremism and calls to violence. I can't think of any nation with more of a right—even a duty—to manage its society and prevent society-level mass crimes.
That's a strange thing to say. Are you suggesting that the German people are especially vulnerable to committing society-level mass crimes (compared to other nationalities) and thus have a duty (to who?) to be extra vigilant and tough on themselves?
Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do.
It's a fine line, and it's why a functioning democracy and judicial system is so important in finding the right balance (and ensuring there's public oversight[2]).
One of the most important values in German politics is the concept of "wehrhafte Demokratie"[1], essentially, the idea that Germany can't ever again let the democratic system be defeated by populists, even a majority.
[2]: Personally, I'm not a fan of having underpaid teams of "content moderators" in charge of deciding what constitutes acceptable public discourse precisely because there's insufficient democratic oversight. It's also a horrible, psychologically taxing job. It's a hard problem that won't be solved by ignoring it.
We made the decision because the law is not a arbitrary thing it gets implemented because of what is written in our constitution and by law makers that we voted into place. If you want to change the law do it politically and get a majority like we did with cannabis and stop rambling about "freedoms" on the internet.
To ramble about something means to talk about it in a confused way. If you find something specific confusing about the way the parent comment talks about "freedoms", maybe you should point that out. (Of course the parent comment doesn't talk about "freedoms" at all, confused or not.)
> Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do.
Not everybody in the world wants to be the one who decides what is extreme or mainstream.
He fears to be silenced and ostracized or that his right to free speech will be suppressed.
That all because there could be a possibility that a for-profit company gets forbidden that is not complying with the laws of the country it itself is operating in. This is rambling.
Arguably in a well run society those groups would have so little power / influence that they wouldn’t be limited by how well they are able to communicate privately. The student protests in the 70s and coocurring terror campaign was not happening in a vacuum but because former Nazis had been part of all aspects of post-war Germany and young people were not having it.
Organize what? Hate? Violence? Countries have been invaded for allowing certain like-minded people to meet and organize things within thier boarders. Lets not pretend that all speech should be free. Every country on earth limits criminal activity, limits those wanting to organize violence or rampant illegality.
> say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker
if those stickers contained email address rather than telegram channel then would we consider banning email services? Blocking Telegram because it is being used for drugs is absurd. Telegram is a messenger and if people are using it for drugs then what do you expect Telegram to do?
Not a popular statement on HN, nor one I relish making, but both of those can usually be intercepted by the state and reviewed. So less ban and more investigate.
I think we can all admit that end to end encrypted messaging is a thorny problem as far as police work is concerned.
What the F do you mean by all over Hamburg? I only see them around Sternschanze, St.Pauli and sometimes in and around stations of the Hoch-/S-Bahn, but much less, and more random. Ottensen? Almost none. Elbvororte? None, with the exception of the stations. Blankenese? None. Not even the station. Berliner Tor? Sticker heavy, but nothing special caught my eye so far. Although I haven't had a need to be there for about 4 months. Hm, Jungfernstieg. Clean. Hafencity. Clean. Reeperbahn maybe? No clue, I avoid being there as much as possible. Same goes for Hauptbahnhof.
and also:
recently I get dragged into "free-thinking" circles, the same mechanism as with crypto and other spam applies. Apparently bots harvest accounts from big public groups, and once you join them the querdenker-spam appears.
It also doesn't help when Telegram doesnt act on laws being broken on their platform as well as being out of reach and effectively evading jurisdiction.
Also: My guess is that moderation is worse for non-english content. Just search via the "users and groups nearby" feature and you'll find drugs, prostitution, racist groups, vaccination certificate "services", covid denial groups and so on. It's a cesspool of shady stuff you won't find that easily on other messengers. Addendum: the 1.5gb-per-file file-sharing feature is also frequently used for piracy. There's PDF bots for serving NYT paywalled content and so on.
What scary about this idea to me, is that it opens the door to false flag operations.
A bad actor that wants to hobble free speech and communication could flood a system with illegal, antisemitic speech, and then turn around and use that speech that they are spreading as a justification to have the communication platform taken down.
Only one Telegram feature is mentioned in the source documents I've read, namely public searchable groups. I've heard that people in the ministries and agencies worry that nazis can recruit e.g. by searching for groups where people worry about this or that threat to nature, then joining and gradually trying to turn conversation towards threats to the Homeland. That kind of thing.
A communication platform doesn't have to have that. Signal has groups, but you can't search for and join a group except by knowing a person in the group. Facebok has groups too, and some of those are (rumour has it) used/mentioned like the Telegram ones.
I don't understand why the general media talk about "encrypted messenger service" when the source documents focus on a single feature that is essentially unencrypted, because public and searchable.
You don't even need false flag operations. Real COVID-deniers and Nazis are damn convenient if you want to ban telegram. They are also convenient if you want to prevent more strict COVID measures in order to "save the economy". Or to get everybody infected in a semi-controlled manner so you can "return back to normal". Or if you want to close the borders and restrict immigration.
A lot of these people who think they are very edgy, critical and radical are just being played by the establishment.
>What scary about this idea to me, is that it opens the door to false flag operations.
Yeah, the German police/state is not new to this. There are always reports that the German police in plain clothes infiltrate protest groups and start throwing rocks at the riot police in uniforms, in order to justify police intervention by force to break up the protest.
At she same time, Telegram gets praised in German media when it comes to allowing supporting pro western activist and opposition in Belarus, Russia, Hong-Kong and other “enemy” states.
It's hilarious to watch both praising and bashing Telegram in the same evening news, and how no journalist seems to care.
Telegram's distinct feature is the lack of state surveillance. This allows activists and oppositions all over the world to use it. But not only in Belarus Hong Kong and Russia, but also in Germany...
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/todesdrohungen-t...
„In Germany, alleged individual cases of calls for killing from the lateral thinker scene have been discussed for days. Research now shows that there have been calls to kill every day since mid-November.“
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/telegram-verfassungsschutz-...
„Radicalized Corona Deniers
What can the state do about Telegram?
Corona deniers use the Telegram messenger service to let their fantasies of violence run free. The state wants to take action against it. The new interior minister is facing a mammoth task.“
https://www.tagesschau.de/regional/nordrheinwestfalen/wdr-st...
„North Rhine-Westphalia
State security investigates corona demos: anti-Semitism in Telegram chats
At a demonstration against the Corona measures in Kamp-Lintfort, a participant is said to have shown the Hitler salute on Tuesday. The Duisburg State Security is now investigating.
The Duisburg State Security is investigating in the vicinity of the demonstrators who demonstrate as self-proclaimed "walkers" against the corona policy. The allegations are massive: It is about anti-Semitic hate speech. The focus is on chat groups that run via the "Telegram" service. The demonstrations are planned there.“
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/br-recherche/querdenk...
„MAD is investigating two other soldiers
Investigations are currently underway against at least two other Bundeswehr soldiers because they made radical statements against corona measures. Research by BR and tagesschau.de revealed this .
One should pay close attention to the choice of words, according to a mountain hunter in a more than seven-minute voice message published on the Telegram messenger platform in December last year. The Bundeswehr is a "company" in which everything is done to "destroy us patriots who are trapped in the Bundeswehr". What is meant is the obligation to enforce corona vaccinations for soldiers.“
It's only scratching the surface of the reporting, there is much more. Some of the reporting might be due to "collective panic", but a lot of the reporting is due to telegram choosing to stay oblivious to groups that constantly abuse the service to make terrorism plans, e.g. recently a plan to murder the minister of health of a federal state, or groups with tens of thousands of members constantly publishing "traitor" lists of politicians, journalists and other public figures along with their private addresses, names of family members and even schools their kids visit, demanding the group members "inform" these "traitors" and their families that they will be hanged for their actions soon.
At least last bit isn't just journalists making up stuff. I saw "queerdenker" stickers in my city giving a telegram link, which curious as I am checked out, and one of the first things I saw was somebody sharing a list of "Volksverräter" ("traitors to the people") followed by a lot of "hang them" comments by other people.
I distinctly remember one person commenting that he had already sent a letter to one of the politicians containing a "Hinrichtungsbefehl" (order for execution) he cobbled together, of which he posted a screenshot. It was single page letter meant to look "official" that listed "crimes" (such as treason) the politician was supposed to have committed, and concluded that therefore the politician was to be hanged or executed by a firing squad (choice of the politician, isn't that nice? :P). The consensus of people in that group replying to that guy was that the letter was a good one, with some suggestions on how to improve it in the future.
The group and the list in the chat history were still up a week later, so neither the group moderators nor telegram removed it.
On an unrelated note - Telegram is already heavily censored on iPhones because of app store policies and the team refuses to put out an uncensored IPA file that we can sideload to our phones. If someone from the team reads this (I doubt it, since they are very disconnected from western media) please consider it. You already do it for Android!
I haven't. I can sideload apps just fine. But Telegram doesn't provide me with the app file to sideload.
As another comment says, I could compile it myself, but that is hard for someone with no expertise. Not to mention that I wouldn't trust an IPA that someone else put out. It's better if telegram themselves built and host that IPA file.
Interesting I had no idea. So, there’s groups that would work on the web client presumably but not the app. What happens if you join that group using your browser and attempt to see it in the app?
The exact message you see is "Unfortunately, this channel couldn't be displayed on your device.". It doesn't say anything about the app store because apple policies don't allow apps to say that contents are censored because of apple guidelines.
Apple censored channels supporting Belarusian protests because they were publishing personal information of state actors, like judges, KGB and police officers.
It is not possible to do what you are asking for on iOS. They do it for Android because it is possible to sideload apks, but they cannot do the same for iOS.
They tried to block it in Russia in 2018. And failed miserably. Blocking entire subnets, millions of IP addresses on AWS, DigitalOcean and other providers, but Telegram servers can hope between different instances, so it ended up as wack-a-moll where thousands of innocents sites were blocked including some government-related services, banks, payment processing, my little startup project hosted on DO, but not Telegram
Germany banned Wolfenstein 3D when it came out in the 90s. What happened? Wolfenstein became one of the most viral games in Germany. If people want to get Telegram in Germany, they will one way or another.
Wolfenstein became "viral" because there was no legal way to obtain a copy and peer-to-peer spread is by definition "viral". I'd wager Wolfenstein significantly underperformed both in sales and number of players compared to if it had been commercially available. Remember that this was pre-WWW, also PC gaming was much more of a technologically literate hobbyist space and copying floppies was fairly straightforward.
Most Android users probably don't sideload apps at the moment. Telegram is a vital communication tool for the Querdenker (antivax) movement as well as far-right extremist groups. Extremely motivated extremists will surely jump to another platform, but censorship is amazingly effective at hindering recruitment and keeping out the "normies".
FWIW the ban of Wolfenstein was informed by an understanding of games as pure entertainment for kids in the vein of Tetris, Pacman or Space Invaders. "We put swastikas and nazis in this video game" was a legitimately horrifying prospect at the time. If modern Wolfenstein games insisted on not modifying the releases for Germany, they would likely initially be banned but be able to overturn this ban once and for all given we now understand games as a narrative medium like film and nobody ever had to worry about removing the nazis from the Indiana Jones movies.
So leaking addresses of politicians you don't like and calling on your day by day getting more aggressive and extreme far right telegram group is okay for you?
550 MAU and growing fast. 7th most download iOS and Android app. All the "But WhatsApp, there's nothing to do vs FB, they are too powerful" have to admit Telegram is quite the success story.
Ok, a lot of the points raised here come up all the time; maybe it helps if I summarize some more of them:
- Argument: States cannot ban/close platforms - sure they can, as soon as you kick an app off the app store it's over for most of the users. That's a severe step though, and could be legally contested; my personal opinion is that it's realistic a court could deem a complete shutdown unconstitutional.
- Argument: This is censorship - not really, censorship in the German legal context means pre-control of messages before dissemination. The deal here is about implementing measures to follow German laws. Of course, in a wider sense, this is some sort of censorship mechanism which has some technical similarity with other infrastructures such as those in china. But that's the tradeoff in Germany - it's restricting free speech to protect pro-democratic elements. Whether that works or not is going to be an important question in the next years.
>This is censorship - not really, censorship in the German legal context [...]
Censorship, and the legal concept of censorship, are such very different things that using one as the response to the other is silly!
The local lawmaker's definition of censorship in a legal context, when transposed in a non-legal discussion, is just one country's opinion, not an authoritative answer to whether something is censorship.
I'm not sure I follow - the definition of censorship is in some way the most important question here.
It's absolutely vital to understand that prohibiting some speech has been a core feature of Germany's democracy since 1945. At the same time, the public use of the word "censorship" has diluted so much (especially online) that it's hardly useful.
So I'd argue that it totally makes sense to try and define what we're talking about, and how and why the state intervenes.
The reaction is, I think, to the general form of this argument:
> Argument: This is X - not really,
X defined legally (..)
Which is in itself an often occurring argument which (in my opinion) isn't extremely useful.
You are transposing the legal definition of censorship into this argument. This is perfectly alright, except most people who make the argument "this is censorship" aren't referring to the legal definition of censorship. So your counterpoint is moot.
I'm not trying to say that those people are right necessarily, just that arguing against these points requires other arguments than this one.
> . But that's the tradeoff in Germany - it's restricting free speech to protect pro-democratic elements. Whether that works or not is going to be an important question in the next years.
It's a tradeoff and before you know it, you are the one sitting on the wrong side of the table. Watcha gonna do then?
- Germany has a different take on freedom of speech from the US. There are things that you cannot say (holocaust denial, inciting racial violence). We can argue about this, but it's deeply ingrained in the legal system and unrealistic to change
- Germany has a special law regulating responsibilities and content moderation in social media (NetzDG, think section 230 but wider). This law - among other things - mandates content moderation and cooperation with law enforcement
- A key point in the debate surrounding Telegram is the question of whether or not it is a "platform", that is an open social network. Telegram argues that it's a messenger, but in practice, there are many open and public groups used for public debates. So Germany argues that it should be regulated in accordance with the NetzDG, which Telegram denies.
- Recently, there have been a number of death threats and criminal conspiracies which were orchestrated via Telegram; on top, a huge chunk of covid deniers and co are active in this space.
- Telegram so far has not cooperated at all (in contrast with other social platforms, even TikTok).
So in essence, this is currently a battle about the German government saying: Look here, you got a bunch of criminals and terrorists (literally, with weapons) on your platform, you need to do something about it.
Sadly, cutting out Germany means that you'd eventually have to cut out the entire EU. If you just block Germany they're going to push on the EU to take up this fight for them. It'll all be in the name of "stopping online abuse" or something like that.
Germany, in general, seems to be a very poor country to do digital business compared to most other places. This is the same country that required (requires?) streamers to get a broadcasting license that cost thousands of euros to stream to more than 500 people.
It's the other way around, if it's not going through local legislation it gets pushed to the EU level. Doing digital business doesn't seem to be that hard considering that in the end everyone still tries to get german customers/subscribers. And the ruling on broadcasting licenses for streamers was relaxed a lot, it's required if you had more than 20 000 viewers on average over the last 6 months, only very few german streamers are affected by that.
> And the ruling on broadcasting licenses for streamers was relaxed a lot, it's required if you had more than 20 000 viewers on average over the last 6 months, only very few german streamers are affected by that.
That doesn't make it any better. You have +20k viewers on avg last 6 months and the government doesn't like what you are saying for any reason, they revoke your license. If this isn't a control over freedom of speech (and I'm not saying freedom to call violence on people or anything here), I don't know what is really.
> Sadly, cutting out Germany means that you'd eventually have to cut out the entire EU.
Not really; some countries would be against just because it is Germany pushing for it. If necessary, they would call out Germany doing the nazi thing, again, and forcing the rest of Europe to do the same, again.
It used to be 500 viewers. This change happened because streamers lobbied the government to enact change. Now it's just a higher number. The point of this example is to show what kind of a country it is and what the population of the country seems to think is okay. Digital business is something they seem to want to hinder.
Thank you for providing a balanced argument containing facts and further descriptions, in the best spirit of HN. Sadly, it will not keep this thread from becoming dominated by single liners and cheap shots. For evidence, see below.
It all boils down to the question of whether Telegram is a public forum or a messenger service.
> the German government saying: Look here, you got a bunch of criminals and terrorists (literally, with weapons) on your platform, you need to do something about it.
This sounds like a police matter, and should be a question that is asked to, not by, the government.
That is exactly what has happened? The police will be aware of this, and the government need to decide what to do.... The first step is clearly to engage with the platform. Maybe its you that doesn't understand?
The steps are to investigate the criminal / terrorist activity, identify and arrest the culprits, and reach an appropriate outcome in the justice system. Engaging the platform in so far as the platform can legally assist the investigation. Closing (or publicly threatening to close) the platform is not helpful in any way.
Unfortunately, it turns out that it is not too rare that these people doing something in between prepping and planned terrorism are police or military.
I feel this comment is unfairly treated and should be upvoted not downvoted. It provides pretty good insight about the situation.
As someone with family members that are being fed conspiracy theories through telegram groups I'm definitely suspicious. On the other hand, if telegram or the telegram group feature is banned another service will just take its place and these people will just feel more oppressed/attacked possibly making the situation worse.
Overall I feel social media is a net negative for society because it creates a feedback loop of your own "bubble" with more and more extremist and radical ideas, often with no scientific or even remotely factual basis.
It might not be a popular opinion, but a group chat of 1000+ people is less messaging(1) and more either social network (through a badly implemented one) or a something like a publishing channel (if used mainly one directional).
(1): Messaging in the sense of a digital continuation of letter writing.
Still, it's a stupid move.
There are endless alternatives.
And the problem isn't really caused or amplified by Telegram, Telegram is just an arbitrary chosen tool which happen to meet the requirements for the given use case.
It's not even the best tool out there for the given use case.
In the end this is nothing more then trying to find a scapegoat to blame a out of control situation on. A situation caused by years of political/social negligence of increasingly out-of-touch political parties combined with out-of-touch media.
The choice of choosing it as a scapegoat already shows how out of touch it is, I mean like did they forget that it's one of the most widely used messengers in Germany by all parts of the society?? You are literally telling people which have gotten increasingly suspect of the government and media that the tool they are nicely using since years is supposedly easier. Putting people into a very obvious perceived difference between their reality and what you tell them, without a good reasoning basis, is a pretty sure fire way to lose more trust.
The equivalent to section 230 would be Section 10 Telemediengesetz, but from my own experience law enforcement here seizes first and asks questions later for anyone that's not a household name.
NetzDG is much less broad, only applying to social networks (so not Telegram) with more than 2M users.
Why is Telegram not a social network? What's the key differences between a social network, a forum and a messenger service (with groups) that we could define to figure out what telegram actually is?
well, let's check section 1, paragraph 1-3 of NetzDG
>(1) Dieses Gesetz gilt für Telemediendiensteanbieter, die mit Gewinnerzielungsabsicht Plattformen im Internet betreiben, die dazu bestimmt sind, dass Nutzer beliebige Inhalte mit anderen Nutzern teilen oder der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich machen (soziale Netzwerke).
We have a requirement for profit motive (so the Fediverse is mostly safe) and sharing arbitrary content with different users (broadly) or the public.
>(2) Plattformen mit journalistisch-redaktionell gestalteten Angeboten, die vom Diensteanbieter selbst verantwortet werden, gelten nicht als soziale Netzwerke im Sinne dieses Gesetzes.
Blogs and news sites that do not claim the above-mentioned protection under TMG are specifically excluded as social networks here.
>(3) Das Gleiche gilt für Plattformen, die zur Individualkommunikation oder zur Verbreitung spezifischer Inhalte bestimmt sind.
Further exceptions for "individual communication" and "posting specific content".
So I guess a Telegram Group specifically counts as a social network under this definition. It'd be anyone's guess how many people a group needs to no longer count as "individual communication", that's probably for a German court to decide.
The notion of a platform watching over group conversations, with its only purpose being engagement, is scarier.
There is nothing more engaging than existential threat. As long as anybody anywhere stands to benefit from fomenting the idea of existential threat and using the terror thus inspired to get a social group to exterminate a selected other social group… which is then itself under existential threat and can respond in kind… the only refuge to this is something like a government or legal system watching over this.
Otherwise competitive pressure will ensure that the platform fomenting the most fear of existential threat will have the most engagement and will prosper. YouTube seems to have already recognized this and is grappling with it in its own way. I doubt Telegram has any wish to moderate its real purpose for existence and undermine the engagement it must have to survive.
And there is nobody who cannot be turned monstrous through invoking existential threat: all the better if it's a realistic fear, it will persist long after the tables are turned and the victim has become the monster in turn. History has shown this really clearly.
Most governments are not interested in you talking nonsense in your group. They're interested in people planning to overthrow them or other criminal acts. Depending on the type of government that might be good or bad.
Yeah, and that wasn't the only example. Here is another recent one[1]:
German soldier (so a guy who had prolonged training and access to serious weapons) gives German government an "ultimatum". He was a heavy telegram user as well.
I am generally a proponent of as much free speech as possible, as long as it is lawful, and the laws in question are not just authoritarian wet dreams. Inciting violence or making threats is not lawful. It's unlawful not just in Germany but in most other places including the US too, and for good reason.
When it comes to these kinds of German telegram groups we're not even talking about thinly-veiled threats where there is wiggle room in interpretation, we're talking about people saying "we're at war and must fight until every politician and traitor is executed. Arm yourself today!".
Telegram groups promoting these kinds of threats daily with tens of thousands of members exist, and telegram provides tools to create and promote such groups easily. So I am not buying any claim that they are a mere messenger service.
This is therefore one of the few cases where I do not mind the government demanding the company take action, or else face legal consequences up to effectively shutting them down within Germany.
What gives me pause at the same time is that German politicians usually do not just demand Telegram shut down clearly illegal speech like threats, but also constantly talk about vague "misinformation"/"fake news"/"conspiracy theories". As much as "fake news" sucks, it cannot be the government in a free society deciding what is "real news".
You've had censorship in Germany for a very long time now, but I don't think people like to think of it as censorship. You (literally) can land up in jail for verbalising certain things. IMO, the scary part is how positively people view this, like it's a feature (and then proceed to talk about the CCP or Russia like they are stuck in the mid 1500's).
Another example of how centralized messengers are more vulnerable than decentralized, end-to-end encrypted networks, where anyone can run a client.
To clarify how regular people could get access to a client… any https website could host a front end widget, for instance. Easy delivery via web browser (which is general-purpose enough that it can’t ban all possible widgets and hard to ban).
Good luck to Germany in this futile approach.Also, what happened to WhatsApp,Wickr, or even Facebook?Those have been aswell used in terrorist attacks years ago when the crisis hit Germany, UK, and France more than the rest of the continent.Suddenly they're not a problem at all, we only need to ban something when it's going against the current narrative.
This doesn't clarify what "shutdown" means. The last thing I heard was pressuring Google to remove it from the Play Store in Germany but this sounds like it could also mean a DNS block (which notably doesn't prevent traffic to the IP addresses).
This is how it works: The Government will shut down the apps that refuse to cooperate with the state until either they start to cooperate, or people migrate to the ones who already do cooperate with the state. Simple.
Either way, the state wins, since not all chat apps are self-righteous enough to say no to a lucrative market on principle of refusing to cooperate with a nation state. They learned that from watching companies bend over backwards for the Chinese market.
While I do agree with her that something must be done about Telegram given that criminal activity including Holocaust denial and plotting murder of governors [1] can go on there without any moderation while requests for providing IP addresses and other user data are being routinely ignored by the service, she is falling into the same trap as many interior politicians do and thinks that the solution is primarily to put pressure on Telegram.
It would be better to put police pressure on the ringleaders and participators of such Telegram channels. They are often enough known by clear name and march on the streets so they can be arrested there, but that requires actual effort from a police force that is already under suspicion of far-right infiltration.
Makes sense. After closing down their nuclear plants, Germany is now completely dependent on Russian gas. They don't want to be dependent on Russian telecom as well.
We are also having this discussion here in Brazil, some supreme court minister is all fussy and triggered because telegram doesn't bans ""misinformation"" and ""hate speech"".
iPhone users have no sideloading capabilities and for androids you need to be at least a bit tech savvy. speaking only for mobile access if telegram gets dropped from the app stores it would shrink the user base.
> Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot? Telegram and Signal, the encrypted services that keep conversations confidential, are increasingly popular. Our tech columnists discuss whether this could get ugly.
> A report this week found that the messaging app had emerged as a central hub for several conspiracy movements espousing antisemitic tropes and memes, including QAnon, as well as others on the extreme right promoting violence.
> In collaboration with anti-fascist research group the White Rose Society, the Guardian has tracked McLean’s activity through the rabbit warren of largely unregulated Telegram groups and found that he describes a vastly different version of his intentions.
> Why right-wing extremists’ favorite new platform is so dangerous. Telegram’s lax content moderation and encrypted chats make it a convenient tool for extremists.
But none of the links you provided make an argument against Telegram itself, and you wouldn't find one anywhere. Encryption is free, and so is the ability to use any platform or communication method. It's pointless to argue against "lax content moderation", or "trendy radicalization platform of the month".. but I would expect no less from a website such as Vox. Perhaps those complaining currently about it in Germany may consider spending their time more wisely tackling the societal issues that cause such phenomena?
So we should ban anything that these 'white supremacists', 'right-wing extremists' or 'conspiracy movements' are using, even if it is end-to-end encryption which can be used by anybody? Does that mean we should we ban encryption in general because the same so-called 'Nazis' can also use something like Signal for secure communications?
No. Why? Simply because not only it is free to use, but the roads to hell are paved with good intentions. This is what these 'journalists' from these publications fail to highlight each time privacy or free software supporters build tools that can also be used by terrorists and extremists.
Like one of the comments, the links provided make no argument against Telegram or similar tools like Telegram itself. The responses of these editors in those links towards mentioning a tool used for good now being abused by malicious users is highly predictable, repetitive and at most unsurprising.
You mean people who organize protests without permit (because they don't like the mandates for masks and minimum separation that would come with the permit), and when confronted with police claim they are just a couple hundred people who happen to be on a walk at the same time by pure coincidence.
I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it was just that. Police here deserve to be stress tested and in principle you can spontaneously declare something to be an assembly by naming someone the assembly leader. The issue is their message and the right wing / nazis that they are walking among them.
It's not a problem who is walking among them or what their message is. Anyone has the right to express his opinion. I am getting really sick of hearing this argument. No there is nothing in the constitution that would forbid you to protest peacefully alongside whoever. Also the message you are allowed to voice is not defined by you or some politician.
If you have a problem with some of the protestants you can voice your concerns. But stop judging everybody participating.
I judge them very harshly, they deserve no respect or sympathy. It should never be acceptable to walk with people that minimise the holocaust or talk openly about how they had talks with former army members of armed insurrection in their telegram channels (there are screenshots to prove that). They chose "Reichsprogrom Nacht" of all days to do a candle procession through Heidelberg for instance, with known Neo-Nazis in their ranks.
But yeah they should be free to continue to self-incriminate themselves on Telegram and elsewhere. It is not like they are some kind of sophisticated state level threat.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
Just because you label a protest march as "spontaneously going for a walk", it is still a protest march, especially if you organise it (here: via Telegram groups).
The German constitution (art. 8) generally grants the right to assemble peacefully and without weapons without requiring an explicit permit. However, if you plan to do it outdoors in public space, you need to declare it to the local authorities (with the intent to ensure safety for both the protesters and the general public). Spontaneous gatherings are exempt from this, BUT, if you organise a "spontaneous walk" days ahead via Telegram, arguably it is not very spontaneous anymore.
A declared demonstration can be approved with additional requirements (e.g. limiting movement to predefined areas) or even prohibited, provided there are grounds that it cannot be conducted safely. From what I can see, the reason that many anti-covid protests fall victim to this, is that the audience has demonstrated a tendency to break regulations that are in place to ensure public health and safety (e.g. mask mandate and distancing).
If you don't like the regulations, you can protest against them. If you break the regulations however, you cannot.
These "Spaziergänge" are an unholy mixture of racists, anti-democratic groups, anti-vaxxers and lots more.
The far right has found "new friends" in the people critizing the Covid rules of the government. They are now marching side by side, obviously trying to make their far right positions look "not that bad" by blending in with the others.
Yesterday they were marching against immigration, today it's Covid.
edit: Oh, and they are organizing and spreading misinformation via Telegram. Also there's your obligatory dose of self-justice and murder calls against politicians involved.
The main thing that makes „far right“ look not that bad is downplaying the term. Now it's super easy to become neonazi/far right/fascist/antivax and whatnot. But once you get called names once and the world doesn't stop... Stigma is gone and then good luck trying to establish that this position is just a little bit wrong, but THAT is truly bad.
Generally yes, but once certain people get violent or disobey specific rules, it is the job of the government to stop that. Otherwise things escalate badly.
Sure but that doesn't include shutting down Telegram. It is easy enough to infiltrate those groups and keep them under surveillance. You can do very basic police work to counter act them.
Shutting down is the last resort. If Telegram wants to continue operation, they have to comply to the local laws.
Infiltration also isn't as easy as it sounds. They can use that as a defense. Which actually happend several years ago. They failed to get rid of the NPD, a Neo-Nazi party, because they couldn't be sure if their plans were legit.
Not agreeing with your world view does not make people "an unholy mixture of racists, anti-democratic groups, anti-vaxxers and lots more". You just show your ignorance and the lack of accepting a difference in opinion.
They have people running around with "Reichsflagge". There are people from 3. Weg, a known Neo-Nazi party. There are people from AfD, another Ultra-Conservative right extremist party. There are people from "Die Basis", a party full of Nazis and conspiracy nutjobs. There are people holding anti-vaxx signs. They are calling to bring in children as human shields. They are calling for disassembly of the government.
Every legitimate protest throws those kind of people out. They don't. You may want to ask them why. Funnily enough many of those "protests" are organized by known extremists or those party members.
Is it defined by you who is allowed to participate and what makes a protest legitimate? If people there make illegal actions, the police has to intervene. That's it.
Every protest has someone organizing it. It is their job to distance themselves from certain groups and to send them off. And if those groups don't comply, the police is happy to help. But instead of doing that, they happily walk side by side with those groups and participate in protests that are organized by those.
They want to be accepted by the majority? Then they need to stop walking with literal Nazis.
So even the Verfassungsschutz is saying that the majority of the protesters are "usual citizens".
I don't want to persuade you of anything. You can think what you want. You should just leave the same freedom to others and not frame them because some nutjobs are part of a protest..
This should remind people that the SPD ("Social" Democrats) is an authoritarian party that is nicknamed "the traitor party" for repeatedly backstabbing its voters.
Schroeder has destroyed the welfare state, increased reliance on Russia's natural gas and got a job at Gazprom after he retired from politics.
I'm sure that Putin will be very glad to shut down Telegram as well.
Same as in the U.S., liberals in Germany are very happy to spread COVID-19 misinformation:
