Should Telegram be blocked?

[Distinctly Average]

I’ve been reading this article on the BBC and it made me sick. 
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/Iot1dIWVS5/hunting-the-monkey-torturers

 

It got me thinking, is there any good left on Telegram anymore? Was there ever? I have never used it, but to me it seems like all I hear are stories of fraudsters using it along with lowlife scum in the above news report, Other social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook were and are guilty of hosting this kind of stuff but at least they are removing it and standing against it. Telegram however seem to be hiding behind human rights, which I would argue in this particular case have been forfeit IMO.

[tkitch]

You can't blame a communication app for humans being absolute shit.

 

It's not telegram's fault that people are being horrible. 

 

As far as Telegram's response?  Well, that's just horrible, and they deserve any negative fallout they get.  But blocking the app isn't going to fix things.

[johnno23]

your asking the same question people ask about tor networks.

its a little like asking if a toxic game community means the game should be banned.

telegram tor and games where toxic communities exist are part n parcel of the freedoms we have.

you have the right to choose if you want to participate or ignore such apps games situations etc. having oversight from any organization that on your behalf decides this is good or that is bad is essentially bad at it core. End of the day when all the bad is gone time to start on the less bad and what follows is ban anything that does not comply to what authority says is allowed

 

 

 

[Fred Castellum]

Telegram has a ton of normal users, it's used by investigative journalists and political activists as well. Sure there is illegal stuff being done on telegram but that doesn't mean the platform itself should be banned. 

Telegram is very often used for communication and spreading of info in the war in Ukraine as well. 

[saintlouisbagels]

*Nintendo enters the chat*

And all emulators and BitTorrent applications should be banned too!

[Lurick]

3 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

*Nintendo enters the chat*

And all emulators and BitTorrent applications should be banned too!

Ban encryption!!

[Distinctly Average]

33 minutes ago, tkitch said:

You can't blame a communication app for humans being absolute shit.

 

It's not telegram's fault that people are being horrible. 

 

As far as Telegram's response?  Well, that's just horrible, and they deserve any negative fallout they get.  But blocking the app isn't going to fix things.

It is their response to this that annoyed me. Add to that the seemingly tens of thousands of fraudsters abusing the platform and it feels like it is spiralling out of control. Sure, YouTube need to do more blocking the comment spam that often directs to telegram. It is obvious something needs to change, I just don’t know what or how.

 

As a hands up, I am not a telegram user so don’t know the platform. Things like the above put me right off ever visiting 

[Avocado Diaboli]

Every tool that serves to protect your privacy inherently has the potential for harm and abuse. It's pointless to pontificate about it or to ask if it should be banned. If you ban Telegram, you also have to ban all other avenues of private, anonymous communication. Then you're well on your way of legitimizing governments spying on their population. You can't effectively monitor all actions to root out undesirable behavior without inherently invading privacy. 

 

If your stance is that transparency is more important than privacy, you must be willing to give up all your privacy in the process. Anything less is both disingenuous and next to impossible to fairly determine where to draw the line about what should be public and what not, because you will always run in to edge cases.

 

If your stance is that privacy is more important than transparency, then you will have to come to terms with the fact that this will be true for both you and any sort of deviants our species can produce.

 

There is no middle ground here where you will find broad consensus, it is a black-and-white issue. And the unfortunate truth is that even if you mandate transparency, the people willing to hide in the shadows will probably still find ways to do so.

[Fred Castellum]

18 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Despite the MSM's claims about the service being used for "terrorism"... you'd really think an actual terrorist would be so stupid to sign up for a service that requires him enter his PHONE NUMBER??? I repeat, his PHONE NUMBER, THAT IS TRACEABLE TO HIS REAL NAME, he couldn't possibly be so dumb? right?

Oh, well, maybe they're not as smart as I thought.

 

Well, I'm not even a criminal and I wouldn't use a privacywashed service like Telegram. It's not private from the moment you need a traceable phone number and SIM card to use it, it's not private because it runs on smartphones ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Banning the service won't make those users vanish, this is like banning reddit or 4chan, those are cesspools full of the worst imaginable people with access to a computer, but I'm against banning or shutting them down, why? it'd be chaos, think for a minute those sites are vials full of a highly dangerous and lethal virus, you want to get rid of them so you go to a crowded place and... smash them against the floor? NO! that's dumb. We're at a point where getting rid of those sites would only make things worse, like a virus, imagine a spread of atheist neckbeards and mysoginistic channers to the rest of the internet, it's a terrible idea. Keep them there.

Banning Telegram won't cause that BUT those users will simply move on and use another platform, while the people using it for legitimate non-illegal things would be suddenly criminalised and left without access to their chat platform.

 

You know, I always had the idea Telegram is a sting app made by the CIA to bait pro-privacy activists into it and siphon their info out. Just my theory. It seems... sus, and as I said, it's not actually private/anon.

That is was a funny point I had thought of, the requirement of having a phone number to even sign up to use the service.

What do you think about other privacy platforms like Session and whatnot?

[Lurking]

Not sure if you are just trolling..... But this is like saying the printing press ruined everything because it enabled the spread of "Mein Kampf".

 

I never used telegram either (but I don't start a thread to block it....). But I assume it is used by your grandparents exchanging cookie recipes, and by some nasty people. Likely a neutral platform that includes the middle and the extremes of society.

 

May as well outlaw phones and letters. You know, someone uses the postal system to send blackmail letters. 

[Distinctly Average]

1 hour ago, Lurking said:

Not sure if you are just trolling..... But this is like saying the printing press ruined everything because it enabled the spread of "Mein Kampf".

 

I never used telegram either (but I don't start a thread to block it....). But I assume it is used by your grandparents exchanging cookie recipes, and by some nasty people. Likely a neutral platform that includes the middle and the extremes of society.

 

May as well outlaw phones and letters. You know, someone uses the postal system to send blackmail letters. 

I probably worded it wrong, possibly in a moment of anger at their response to the monkey torture they are allowing to be spread on their platform. Couple that with almost every YouTube comment thread being filled with scammers using telegram these days and it leaves a bad taste for the platform. 
 

Social media does need policing to some level. Another report recently highlighted the same platform as hosting, or linking to, child abuse. The line has to be drawn where things are illegal. Both the monkey torture, or at least sharing it, and child abuse are illegal.

[Lurking]

2 hours ago, Distinctly Average said:

I probably worded it wrong, possibly in a moment of anger at their response to the monkey torture they are allowing to be spread on their platform. Couple that with almost every YouTube comment thread being filled with scammers using telegram these days and it leaves a bad taste for the platform. 
 

Social media does need policing to some level. Another report recently highlighted the same platform as hosting, or linking to, child abuse. The line has to be drawn where things are illegal. Both the monkey torture, or at least sharing it, and child abuse are illegal.

I'm sure child abuse happens in some homes as well. In fact, most is done by relatives of the child. Should we outlaw homes now? Regulate and supervisor the child's contact with parents and relatives?

 

I didn't look at that monkey issue. But see it that way: Now people know it is going on and could do something about it (if it is illegal). Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The people who actually commit crimes would be the ones interested in information not spreading. 

 

Just don't read YT comments. Only watch the videos you like. 

 

You won't prevent bad things by censorship or crippling technology. Humans have lied, deceived, killed, enslaved and tortured for thousands of years without modern communication, social media and so on. Banning one specific platform will change nothing. 

 

Read some old articles from 100 years ago how old people predicted  the end of the civilized World because of the gramophone or radio that will be used influence people and upset the order.

[kirashi]

10 hours ago, Distinctly Average said:

I’ve been reading this article on the BBC and it made me sick. 
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/Iot1dIWVS5/hunting-the-monkey-torturers

 

It got me thinking, is there any good left on Telegram anymore? Was there ever? I have never used it, but to me it seems like all I hear are stories of fraudsters using it along with lowlife scum in the above news report, Other social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook were and are guilty of hosting this kind of stuff but at least they are removing it and standing against it. Telegram however seem to be hiding behind human rights, which I would argue in this particular case have been forfeit IMO.

9 hours ago, Distinctly Average said:

It is their response to this that annoyed me. Add to that the seemingly tens of thousands of fraudsters abusing the platform and it feels like it is spiralling out of control. Sure, YouTube need to do more blocking the comment spam that often directs to telegram. It is obvious something needs to change, I just don’t know what or how.

 

As a hands up, I am not a telegram user so don’t know the platform. Things like the above put me right off ever visiting 

I mean, Fox News Network airs a ton of misleading news, some of which has the potential to cause viewers to do terrible things, and yet they're still broadcasting more fake news everyday... What makes you think taking down one communications platform will prevent humans from being awful?

 

I don't agree with the situation either, but encrypted messaging platforms are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they had a way to spy on end-to-end encrypted content to ensure it's not being used for nefarious things, they'd compromise the integrity and entire purpose of encryption.

[Fred Castellum]

2 hours ago, Caroline said:

The safest way to prevent corporations from stealing your data is by keeping your mouth shut. Talk about the important stuff in person and without smartphones or other listening devices in the house, when my more normie relatives come to visit I have them shut off the phones and keep them outside the house in a box, not a faraday cage or anything fancy, just a box.

 

The unfortunate truth, you really do got the extra mile though with the whole phone storage thing. 

[Fred Castellum]

10 hours ago, Caroline said:

No top secret talks going on but I don't want Google to eavesdrop our Durak games. It's also a way to have the teens talk instead of having those hellish devices glued to their hands.

Wow how could you subject them to such abject horror? To separate them from their own phones, depriving them of all media that the internet provides to then force them to play a card game?! Inhumane~!

[Average Nerd]

On 6/20/2023 at 9:04 PM, Lurking said:

But I assume it is used by your grandparents exchanging cookie recipes, and by some nasty people.

Personally I use Telegram for home automation, since you can have microcontrollers like an ESP32 communicating with you and informing you about events like the light being on in a empty room, your greenhouse overheating or an unexpected motion being detected. As far as I know, Telegram is the only service that allows you to do this, it being banned would be a huge problem for me.

[Polderviking]

I've used Telegram for nearly a decade now as a communication platform for several games, and I also use it somewhat professionally because you can actually programatically do things with it (with bots for example) as opposed to it's popular facebook owned counterpart that can do exactly none of that.

From the bubble of my use case I don't understad the flak TG gets in the media.

 

You could ban it, but that would be nothing more than ostrich politics, considering you're banning a symptom.
I like a comment that was made earlier in this topic, you can't blame Telegram for people beeing sick.

[Distinctly Average]

7 hours ago, Polderviking said:

I've used Telegram for nearly a decade now as a communication platform for several games, and I also use it somewhat professionally because you can actually programatically do things with it (with bots for example) as opposed to it's popular facebook owned counterpart that can do exactly none of that.

From the bubble of my use case I don't understad the flak TG gets in the media.

 

You could ban it, but that would be nothing more than ostrich politics, considering you're banning a symptom.
I like a comment that was made earlier in this topic, you can't blame Telegram for people beeing sick.

As I said above, ban was a bit harsh a comment. Telegrams response was appalling and they tried to hide behind free speech. That term is often miss-understood and abused. Telegram need to clean up their act.

[Avocado Diaboli]

9 hours ago, Distinctly Average said:

As I said above, ban was a bit harsh a comment. Telegrams response was appalling and they tried to hide behind free speech. That term is often miss-understood and abused. Telegram need to clean up their act.

Whether you want to call it a free speech issue or not is irrelevant. They advertise privacy under that term. There's no act to clean up. As I outlined above, you either condone privacy measures and accept criminals gain from that too, or you demand transparency and have to accept that you give up all your privacy in the process. There's no selective transparency just because some actions are illegal or immoral.

[wanderingfool2]

On 6/20/2023 at 10:34 AM, Caroline said:

Despite the MSM's claims about the service being used for "terrorism"... you'd really think an actual terrorist would be so stupid to sign up for a service that requires him enter his PHONE NUMBER??? I repeat, his PHONE NUMBER, THAT IS TRACEABLE TO HIS REAL NAME, he couldn't possibly be so dumb? right?

Oh, well, maybe they're not as smart as I thought.

Could just use a burner number to sign up with it.

 

Lots of easy ways to get and cycle through tons of numbers; and with just a touch of work it's possible without revealing anything.

 

 

10 hours ago, Distinctly Average said:

As I said above, ban was a bit harsh a comment. Telegrams response was appalling and they tried to hide behind free speech. That term is often miss-understood and abused. Telegram need to clean up their act.

I don't know the infrastructure of Telegram, never really looked it up...but depending what forms of encryption they use they might not actively be able to really scan groups.

 

It's also hard to scan everything that comes through, as then you are being a content moderator and could potentially run foul with safe harbor stuff.

 

[Distinctly Average]

5 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Whether you want to call it a free speech issue or not is irrelevant. They advertise privacy under that term. There's no act to clean up. As I outlined above, you either condone privacy measures and accept criminals gain from that too, or you demand transparency and have to accept that you give up all your privacy in the process. There's no selective transparency just because some actions are illegal or immoral.

If as a company it is bought to your attention that an employee or customer is doing something illegal then in most countries you are required to do something about it. Here that is certainly the case. If telegram are told a particular user is spreading child abuse, torture etc then they should not, simple because they are in a locale that allows it, be allowed to hide behind privacy and not as a result do anything about it. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 minute ago, Distinctly Average said:

If as a company it is bought to your attention that an employee or customer is doing something illegal then in most countries you are required to do something about it. Here that is certainly the case. If telegram are told a particular user is spreading child abuse, torture etc then they should not, simple because they are in a locale that allows it, be allowed to hide behind privacy and not as a result do anything about it. 

I think you misunderstand what "privacy" means. Because if a company promises me privacy and secure end-to-end encryption, I expect that it doesn't have a backdoor into it. That would defeat the purpose entirely. Again, privacy is not a grey area, you either have it or you don't. And if someone designs a system that enforces privacy, they don't have a master key that can selectively disable that privacy.

[Distinctly Average]

3 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I think you misunderstand what "privacy" means. Because if a company promises me privacy and secure end-to-end encryption, I expect that it doesn't have a backdoor into it. That would defeat the purpose entirely. Again, privacy is not a grey area, you either have it or you don't. And if someone designs a system that enforces privacy, they don't have a master key that can selectively disable that privacy.

Point is, if illegal activity is reported to them then they should not run and hide behind privacy. In many cases there are group’s advertising what they are doing to like minded assholes. They forfeit any right to privacy, just like any child abuser would if they did it in their own home. Oh, they raped a 5 year old in their own home so it is private and we should let them do it!!!!! There is a big difference between privacy and breaking the law.

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, Distinctly Average said:

Point is, if illegal activity is reported to them then they should not run and hide behind privacy. In many cases there are group’s advertising what they are doing to like minded assholes. They forfeit any right to privacy, just like any child abuser would if they did it in their own home. Oh, they raped a 5 year old in their own home so it is private and we should let them do it!!!!! There is a big difference between privacy and breaking the law.

You're still not getting it, are you? If I build a system with total encryption that I can't break - and reasonably I shouldn't be able to, because otherwise it's terrible encryption that other people could also break - then I could receive billions of reports of criminal activity and I literally cannot do a single thing about it other than shut down the service entirely because I can't break the encryption. That's the point! And that will always be true for any privacy focused service. You cannot have it both ways here.

[Distinctly Average]

44 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

You're still not getting it, are you? If I build a system with total encryption that I can't break - and reasonably I shouldn't be able to, because otherwise it's terrible encryption that other people could also break - then I could receive billions of reports of criminal activity and I literally cannot do a single thing about it other than shut down the service entirely because I can't break the encryption. That's the point! And that will always be true for any privacy focused service. You cannot have it both ways here.

You are the one that is not getting it. If it is proven, by in this case someone from law enforcement joining one of these groups as well as under cover reporters, that the group owners are dodgy gits who need their man globes chewed off by rabid goats then privacy has sod all to do with it. The platform know about said dodgy twats but protect them. Just because something is encrypted to the nth degree doesn’t mean there are still no methods to uncover what said dodgy twats are doing. The point is that the platform, despite knowing what is going on, are doing sod all to help prevent it. They do not need to break privacy to do that.

 

Next time someone tortures one of you or your families pets, or abuses a family member, then you can talk about the perpetrators right to privacy. The right to privacy does not extend to certain crimes. 
 

This kind of privacy is a relatively new thing. 15-20 years ago it did not exist. We had, and still do have the right to a private life. But this right cannot be at all costs.