MINIMAL INTERVENTION
Telegram is one of the world’s biggest social media platforms with an estimated 900 million monthly users, many of whom follow popular channels that broadcast content to thousands of people.
It’s also unique in its approach to overseeing all that activity: It doesn’t.
While its peers invest heavily in content moderation and cooperate with law enforcement, Telegram has a minimal-intervention policy that has contributed to its low operational costs. Durov once told the Financial Times that each Telegram user cost the company just US$0.70 a year to support.
His platform has been linked to the spread of conspiracy theory groups, CSAM and terrorism, with Islamic State having reportedly used the app as a communication hub for nearly a decade. Such groups don’t just use the app for alleged secrecy, but for its “anything goes” approach to moderation.
During the recent United Kingdom riots, calls to violence proliferated on the platform even though they broke the app’s rules. One such post was only taken down after I contacted the app about it. Despite all this, Telegram has proudly maintained a stance of non-cooperation. In its FAQs the company states “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.”
Now, in response to the arrest, Telegram has said it’s “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform. Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving”.
But it’s far from “absurd” for a company to be held accountable for criminal activity on its platform. Telegram is in this position because of its choice to avoid content moderation – and not because of an encroaching effort by a government to conduct surveillance on its supposedly secret chats.
Cryptography experts have long pointed out that Telegram is not fully end-to-end encrypted. Most chats on the app use client-server encryption, meaning Telegram could access message contents if it chose to (and much of the content on the platform is on public channels anyway).
The company’s “Secret Chats” feature does offer end-to-end encryption, but that’s not the default and it isn’t always used for regular communication. In essence, Telegram has created an illusion of total privacy while retaining the technical means to monitor content – a capability it chooses not to use.
From: channelnewsasia
Business News
