Telegram Messenger

Understandably pushback would be low since nobody uses telegram here, but still feels weird that department of health and welfare would have any power in this case.

Hands off the least cancerous “popular” instant messaging app out there please.

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Taiwan has no totalitarian firewall to block anything meaningfully. Deep packet inspection - Wikipedia

They could probably instruct ISP’s to block DNS requests to Telegram API, which can easily be solved by using any other open DNS service.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/telegram-messaging-app-ceo-pavel-durov-arrested-france-tf1-tv-says-2024-08-24/

  • Telegram messaging app CEO Durov arrested in France

Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.

TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.

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The winds of change are definitely blowing in the direction of censorship. AFAIK it’s impossible to use Telegram in a truly anonymous fashion - the authorities can track illegal activity there with relative ease. The aim here is almost certainly to clamp down on public discussion of political issues.

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We are moving towards a more authoritarian, curated society worldwide for sure. Immigration laws didn’t exist until the 20th century, and now every country has broken immigration systems (fun fact, it isn’t broken, it’s meant to keep people out and apart).

And now every country is censoring stuff, not just china.

You think the great firewall is limited to china? Pretty soon every country is going to have their own great firewall.

Just nonsensical to restrict the platform over this as the behaviour can easily just move elsewhere.

This kind of mentality reminds me how Philippines, where porn is illegal (yet one year ranked as largest porn watchers - see here), and some ISPs block a few major platforms like PornHub etc. but also some don’t and obviously there are easy ways around this. Even when I was in mainland China the firewall is super easy to bypass and is essentially useless for anyone who wants to go around it. If you’re a telegram user I wouldn’t worry much lol

EDIT: If you’re a Telegram owner, maybe more worries :laughing:

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I imagine genuine criminals are a bit more sophisticated, and will find alternative ways and means if Telegram disappears. The only people who will be affected are people who want to discuss things the government doesn’t like.

I dunno about that. Hard to tell exactly what’s going on, but Europe and the US are being absolutely flooded by a combination of illegal immigrants and legal immigrants coming in via loopholes. The political class are unashamedly in favour of this, and are waging lawfare against countries that want to stop it happening.

What’s for certain is that governments absolutely hate people discussing it; or if they do discuss it, they want it on open channels like Facebook so that the police don’t have to put in too much effort to arrest you and jail you.

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Which government?
Discuss what things ?
Why do they not like them?

I’ve used Telegram for crypto research before , it has its uses, but it was also an absolute cesspool of fraudsters and hackers trying to steal money from people.

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The U.K. government is a great recent example of this. Ala. “we will arrest foreigners who spread misinformation/misgendering/social violence/blahblahblah”.

Don’t need to look too hard for U.S. and Canadian examples either.

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Oh come on. Don’t you read the news?

It’s a funny thing, but it seems not to be specific to any particular government. The British and Irish governments seem to be at the top of the censorship leaderboard for now, but it ebbs and flows. So in this particular case, France wants to make its presence felt in our Brave New World. It must be one of those things that can’t possibly be a conspiracy because there’s no such thing as conspiracies.

Yes, but they’re pretty easy to spot. You just ignore them and/or delete them.

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I’m only feeling safe to live in Taiwan and the U.S. (for now) and travel to Japan and Vietnam and maybe Portugal or Spain. Don’t want to see the rest of the EU. UK, Ireland, and now France are now off on the deep end.

:uk: UK mass arrests citizens for memes
:fr: France arrests founder of Telegram
:ireland: Ireland tries to ban “mean memes”
:brazil: Brazil forces 𝕏 to flee the country
:australia: Australia tries to censor 𝕏 posts
:eu: EU tries to blackmail Elon Musk
:us: DOJ jails someone for a meme
:venezuela: Maduro blocks all access to 𝕏

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Kinda sad man, you stole that second half from the “End Wokeness” X page and made it look like your own. :rofl:

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1827525250038292770?t=aZrsJerph8sHkdPhUczrdA&s=19

I am guessing you don’t actually know the details to many of these, just want to regurgitate, nice.

Surely you know that hate speech doesn’t fall under free speech? Lots of people confused about this lately.

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Yeah, whatever.

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Yeah, it does. You’re allowed to say you hate someone. Or least you were, until Current Year. The only speech that was proscribed was deliberate incitement to violence - and even there, the bar was set quite high, in that if you claim someone is “inciting violence”, yet no violence transpires, your claim is obviously invalid. This is one of the reasons Imams preaching death to the infidel typically avoid prosecution - if no death comes to the infidel, it’s hard to claim in court that their words were an incitement to violence.

No we’re not, and one reason the loony left attracts such opprobrium these days is their overt dishonesty. They can only claim to be in the right by grossly misrepresenting the opposing position, and implying that people are too stupid to understand. We’ve got eyes in our head and understand just fine.

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You were caught with your pants down to be fair. Copy pasting stuff and passing ot off as your own isn’t a great look. There’s another infamous fella does that on here as well.

Thailand will put people in jail for twenty years for criticizing the king.
Vietnam will also put citizens in jail for promoting democracy and free speech.

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Phew! I guess that’s all right then. For a minute there I was worried that Europe might be trending in the same direction as an authoritarian/Communist country, or a corrupt second-world craphole, but it looks like the sentences are longer than a couple of years for similar “offences” over in those places. So there’s clearly no problem at all.

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Lol.
Ok, if nobody can tell I copied/pasted, that’s their problem.
You are basically steering the topic away from the point being made.
I forgot to italicize it for you BJ.
Apologies.

The word blockage brings to my mind a bowel obstruction

That’s country specific. US, which I agree with, hate speech is free speech. UK, which I don’t agree with, it isn’t.

That isn’t entirely accurate. UK law, in theory at least, doesn’t just place a blanket ban on “hate speech” - there are two or three separate Acts which address this issue, but in general it must include an element of “incitement” to be considered a criminal offence; you must be intending not merely to insult someone, but to “spread hatred” - to set one group of people against another with your speech, or to threaten entire groups of people with some kind of harm. They really are quite draconian, but not as draconian as people think. Thus Humza Useless’s rant about white people could well have fallen within the definition of ‘hate speech’, whereas simply calling someone a paki on the street would not. What’s happening now is that the courts are stretching the law to its absolute limits - and realistically, to breaking point. Most of the convictions and jail sentences being handed out are dubious at best.

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