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In his Telegram post today, Durov — borrowing some of the more “high-level” language that other social media executives have used — said that “Telegram’s moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform,” but he also swiftly moved on to defending the app continuing to allow sensitive content under the category of “war-related coverage.”
“Tackling war-related coverage is seldom obvious.” (He does not define what the line is between “obviously harmful” and “war-related coverage.”)
“While it would be easy for us to destroy this source of information, doing so risks exacerbating an already dire situation,” he continued, citing how, he said, Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of missile strikes. “Would shutting down their channel help save lives — or would it endanger more lives?” he asked in his post today.
Yeah I feel that. Not an easy decision to make.
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As social platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Meta and TikTok face off with regulators and the theater of public opinion for how they are handling incendiary and graphic content, disinformation, writing and other media related to Hamas and Israel, Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, has controversially come out to defend how his messaging app is not taking down some of the more sensitive war-related coverage that can be found on there, claiming that it can prove to be an important channel for information.
In his Telegram post today, Durov — borrowing some of the more “high-level” language that other social media executives have used — said that “Telegram’s moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform,” but he also swiftly moved on to defending the app continuing to allow sensitive content under the category of “war-related coverage.”
“While it would be easy for us to destroy this source of information, doing so risks exacerbating an already dire situation,” he continued, citing how, he said, Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of missile strikes.
Durov’s words and actions should not come as too much of a surprise: they are in line with the company’s previous approach to sensitive content.
It has become, for example, a go-to place for communication around the war in Ukraine, but it’s also become a hotbed for misinformation, as this piece in Verge details.
Resistance groups in Myanmar may be using it, but so are militants supporting the current regime, who are using it to target individuals, as this investigation by CNN showed.
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