Last week, several pro-Palestinian Telegram channels were blocked in European countries, including the “Palestine Archive ??” channel with more than 15,000 followers and the “Resistance News Network” (RNN) with more than 166,000 subscribers. The exact justification of the ban are not known. While Telegram did not respond to a journalistic request, the RNN said that there was no reason for the closure. Anyone who tries to open up the channel in the affected countries now will receive the notification that they cannot be not displayed because they “violate local laws”. RNN and the online outlet The Cradle have spoken of an EU-wide ban.
While the legal basis for the blocking remains unclear, the political reasons are obvious. RNN itself explained to Peoples Dispatch: “We believe RNN was banned because we shed light on the reality of resistance on the ground, which upends the mainstream zionist narrative.“
Kind of hilarious how people in the west would always claims that the differentiating factor between them and countries like China was freedom of expression. Turns out what was really happening was that majority of people in the west were just swallowing their state propaganda uncritically, and there was no need for heavy handed censorship. Now that the state is losing control of the narrative heavy handed measures are promptly introduced.
As always, the west is no different from its adversaries, but people in the west are gullible enough to think they’re special.
Yea, it’s called indexing, it’s well documented: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0090.xml
Playing a bit of devil’s advocate here: any of you used these channels? Could it be that they were just spreading misinformation like every country does at war? Any example of existing zionist Telegram channels?
Dont memeber states have a bunch of idiotic laws against speech?
Probably really easy to justify censorship against anything you want really…
You hurt the vulture’s feelings when you called him out for eating that zebra when she was still alive!
The article is a month old but many users are reporting on new bans since yesterday.
The solution is to not use Telegram, and fuck the govs
how to miss the point entirely
Telegram is not a social for counter the censorship and be private, it’s not good at all to use Telegram for this kind of messaging + with the arrest of Durov, it will even more difficult to counter govs when using Telegram
continuing to miss the point I see
Luckily we have your well thought out comments to explain the point /s
It’s incredible that it needs to be explained that the issue is with the censorship regardless of what particular service is being censored or what you personally happen to think of it.
To combat censorship, first go out a anti-censorship platform and then try to solve the problem
What part of the government is making information illegal are you struggling comprehend? If there was some magical anti-censorship platform that was usable by regular people then it would just be banned, and then people using it would be arrested. This is not a technology problem.
Telegram is awful, but that’s mainly because it is readily bent towards the interests of malicious state actors like we see here. This headline is produced by two things being bad, not just one.
Zionism has corrupted the West.
Been the case for a while. If anything this is more a symptom of the virus being (very slowly) expelled from Western consciousness.
I hope that’s true.
Europa The Just acting unfairly? No way!™
This isn’t a privacy issue.
Censorship and privacy are closely linked but you are right they are different subjects. Telegram blocking access to certain channels based on region overlaps into privacy territory for me but people are free to down vote the post if they disagree.
Most people in the security industries that I’ve ever known are keenly interested in privacy, for good reason. There is a reason certain protesting elements cyber their faces and it’s not usually for nefarious reasons.
