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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> . 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[+] [-] odiroot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thathndude|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tut-urut-utut|4 years ago|reply
It's hilarious to watch both praising and bashing Telegram in the same evening news, and how no journalist seems to care.
[+] [-] pera|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaan7|4 years ago|reply
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] guerrilla|4 years ago|reply
Can you give me a date to look for an example in? I haven't see that yet.
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
When the media is used as propaganda - surely this has never happened before?
[+] [-] iqanq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therufa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayacc2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetinari|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnicognate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oleg_antonyan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetinari|4 years ago|reply
However, to compensate, there's now encrypted SNI, so the situation is returning back to the 2018 one.
[+] [-] ryanar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbad|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VLM|4 years ago|reply
Whats new is "I want to band all criticism of my religion", that aspect is new for the "free" west.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniqueuid|4 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] tux3|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wreath|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] uniqueuid|4 years ago|reply
Some background for the discussion:
- 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.
[edit] Here is a report on the assassination plot and subsequent raids: https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/15/german-police-launch-rai...
[+] [-] Aerroon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sveme|4 years ago|reply
It all boils down to the question of whether Telegram is a public forum or a messenger service.
[+] [-] akho|4 years ago|reply
This sounds like a police matter, and should be a question that is asked to, not by, the government.
Not that any government understands that…
[+] [-] ascar|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dathinab|4 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] sascha_sl|4 years ago|reply
NetzDG is much less broad, only applying to social networks (so not Telegram) with more than 2M users.
[+] [-] dafoex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emteycz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rndgermandude|4 years ago|reply
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".
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5q5vx/german-soldier-covid-...
[+] [-] kybernetyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beardedman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foepys|4 years ago|reply
Go to the US, go to a police officer, and just tell them you want to kill the President.
Watch what happens.
There is no such thing as absolute free speech, even in the US.
[+] [-] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sebow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpmayer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamilyon2|4 years ago|reply
Does Germany have legal and technical means to block the web version, web.telegram.org ?
[+] [-] taubek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
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.
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kretschmer-drohung-razzia-1...
[+] [-] blackbear_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estranhosidade|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kybernetyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo|4 years ago|reply