Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-supreme-court-orders-suspension-telegram-app-country-reports-2022-03-18/

by Cuintle • 4 years ago

65 37 4 years ago

Cuintle• 4 years ago

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of messaging app Telegram, following a request from the country's federal police, local news broadcasters TV Globo and CNN Brasil both reported on Friday.

henriquemaia• 4 years ago

The decision comes after the messaging app, which is widely used by Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies, failed to respond to court orders to block certain accounts that had been found to disseminate disinformation, Globo reported.

What is really happening? This is as _ad hominem_ as it can get. Boo! Bolsonaro uses it, so block it. So maybe this is an oversimplification of the real reason. Anyway, I don't get it.

marcodiego3• 4 years ago

Brazil has some laws about what app's 'are permitted to do'. Whatsapp was blocked more than once, but eventually complied; Telegram didn't.

cassianoleal• 4 years ago

The decision comes after the messaging app (...) failed to respond to court orders

They are being blocked for not responding to court orders.

svilen_dobrev• 4 years ago

Brazil is the B in BRIC ?

marcodiego3• 4 years ago

Yes. Actually, Brazil is the B in BRICS. S is for South Africa.

marcodiego3• 4 years ago

Doesn't seems like a big problem for me, I can use via tor. But it will be hard or impracticable to convince everybody I know to do the same.

henriquecm8• 4 years ago

There's a fine for anyone that tries to bypass this, a reasonable R$ 100,000.00 per day, and other punishments.

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

That's $20,000/day for anyone wondering. Seems like they mean business.

Bancakes3• 4 years ago

Nobody will know you're using tor.

maronato2• 4 years ago

But it will be hard or impracticable to convince everybody I know to do the same.

That's why it is a problem. Messaging apps are for messaging people

pdimitar2• 4 years ago

The world is gradually sliding into an authoritarian dystopia and nobody is willing to do anything about it.

What a time to be alive.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

Honestly I don't really see the dystopia here. Telegram refused to comply with legal court orders, and as a result the app can't operate in the country.

Honestly to me this is less dystopian than having unaccountable business wholesale ignore the laws of a nation state, which Telegram seems to do just about anywhere. Not sure since when literally following the law qualified as authoritarianism.

pdimitar2• 4 years ago

I don't enjoy giving a-holes a platform but it's way too easy to just point at somebody, call them names that rile up the public, and de-platform them if they are inconvenient for you.

Freedom of speech is important, even if it enables a-holes as a side effect.

Furthermore, this seems like a classic case of political warfare where a company is dragged into the politicians' squabbles and is forced to pick a side. It's an impossible situation for any company involved and we already know even Facebook and Google and Apple gave in.

The "legal court orders" are super easy to craft when you're ruling the country so don't give me that, it's not a good argument at all. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were also "legally" persecuted. Or will you now say they shouldn't have done what they did?

Bancakes3• 4 years ago

Because the courts are abusing their powers and working against the citizens.

djbebs• 4 years ago

Every censor was also doing something legal. It doesn't make their censorship any more rightful.

native_samples2• 4 years ago

You don't see anything dystopian about systematically preventing Brazilians from talking to each other because of "misinformation"? They appear to be trying to wipe Bolsonaro out, judging from the contents of the article.

maronato2• 4 years ago

And just like that, Facebook processes every message sent between every Brazilian.

adontz• 4 years ago

Russia totally failed to block Telegram, lets see what Brazil can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia

https://meduza.io/en/cards/russia-is-trying-to-block-telegra...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...

joshxyz• 4 years ago

From Durov's Channel at Telegram:

"It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.

On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.

We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.

Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.

The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable channel of communication is established, we'll be able to efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil."

https://t.me/durov/180

notepalf2• 4 years ago

That's why decentralized chat protocols like matrix are needed

octoberfranklin2• 4 years ago

Complexity is a form of backdoor centralization.

There is still only one implementation of the Matrix homeserver protocol. Just one.

But hey, at least we have built-in VOIP and color unicode emojiis. You couldn't possibly have a successor to IRC without features like those. Glad the Matrix folks have their priorities straight.

Arathorn• 4 years ago

Your facts are wrong; there are hundreds of dendrite (go) and conduit (rust) Matrix instances live on the network these days, as well as instances of the original synapse Python implementation. Admittedly dendrite and conduit are beta, but then so was synapse until 2020.

mixedCase• 4 years ago

No, you couldn't if you want to ever reach any reasonable threshold of adoption. Most people don't care in the slightest, if they even know about, for federation. They want emojis, and being able to video call grandson. I'd argue stories has been turning into a requirement as well. The WhatsApp feature set. Then you have a lot of people who want the Discord feature set. Any missing feature and "this sucks let's go to Discord".

The world has already tried decentralization without putting the average user's needs and wants first, it's called XMPP and it's there for you to use and call the echo server, if there even is one to respond. Matrix has a long way to go, but at least it hasn't given up before it started.

danielEM• 4 years ago

But isn't telegram a Russian messenger?

petre• 4 years ago

Not really. Its founder was born in Russia and has a Russian name though but he is living abroad and he failed to comply multiple times with the Kremlin's or its agents' requests and as a result he was ousted/resigned from his CEO position at VK.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Career

Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil

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