Telegram CEO will moderate after being arrested in France
An approximation to Sellner’s arrest: German police thwarted a coup plot in 2022 with a protest against the Reichsbürger movement
Sellner was banned from entering Germany in March for being the keynote speaker at the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party’s ill-famed November Potsdam conference. There, he presented a plan to members of Germany’s surging far-right party on conducting mass deportations once it came into power. The far right has not won a state election in Germany since World War II.
There were many messages across the app. That night, Austrian extremist Martin Sellner wrote—the translation here is via Google’s translation tool—that “the ‘liberal West’ is switching off the democracy simulation. All communication channels are about to collapse. Will Musk be arrested next?” The TGStat, a Telegram analysis tool estimated that the message was viewed more than 40,000 times.
The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by Allied powers. German police thwarted their coup plot in 2022, discovering a cache of more than $500,000 in gold and cash, as well as hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets, and ammunition rounds.
Against Terrorism: Laws and Practices in the Social Network, based on the Action of the German Founder of Megaupload
“Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.”
If you are a terrorist or an extremist, you will follow the path of least resistance, and that likely means Telegram, according to Tech Against Terrorism’s founder and executive director.
Around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups are tracked by researchers at Germany’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy. Users are known to post racist and antisemitic hate speech, and some groups contain Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and calls to violence, openly flouting Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass exodus from the platform, where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for radicalization and offline demonstrations, would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.
The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload who is set to be extradited from New Zealand, and who knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal activity on the internet.
I hope that the events of August will improve Telegram and make the social networking industry stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
We hear people saying it isn’t enough. It was easier for criminals to abuse our platform when Telegram added 950M users. I made a goal of making it my personal goal to improve things. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.
It is difficult to establish a balance between privacy and security. Local and EU laws need to be reconciled with privacy laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent internationally as well as ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we have always been open to dialogue.
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. It’s misguided to bring criminal charges against a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages. “
French prosecutors have charged a 39 year old citizen of France with multiple crimes against children and a suspect indicted on charges of criminal terrorism
- French authorities could reach me through a number of ways. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
The French authorities had other ways to reach me, such as Telegram’s official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement last week outlining the wide-ranging charges that Telegram exhibited an “almost total failure to respond to judicial requests.”
The 39-year old citizen of France and the United Arab Emirates was indicted on Aug. 28 in Paris on multiple charges including spreading child abuse images, drug trafficking and failure to comply with law enforcement. He was placed under court monitoring after being ordered to post bail. He is also not permitted to leave the country.
While the Russian born tech billionaire acknowledged Telegram is “not perfect,” he maintained the company has taken down millions of posts and is busy remedying protocols to make the platform “safer and stronger.”
