❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love!
Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.
This was surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement”.
2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.
Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.
All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.
I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
HOLY CRAP! NAACP lawyer came before the Supreme Court and said the quiet part out loud
Janai Nelson said we need race-based districts because: "white Democrats were not voting for black candidates whether they were Democrats or not!"
This is INSANE.
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BREAKING: In an insane move, Justice Ketanji Jackson declares we need to draw Congressional districts based on race because black people are like disabled people
"They don't have equal access to the voting system. They're DISABLED!"
This is utter madness. How did she get on the Supreme Court?!
"My, kind of, paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the ADA against the backdrop of a world generally not accessible to people with disabilities...why is that not what's happening here?!"
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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says this is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway.
Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form.
He calls it a major opportunity for BlackRock, saying the plan is to move beyond traditional financial assets by digitally re-potting them into a new system.
🔗 Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra)
🤖📱 Between empty promises of a billionaire and a social credit system. The “secret” way your behaviour is ranked on X
What is Tweepcred? It’s a reputation system inherited from the days of Twitter, a social credit mechanism built into X, where every like, comment, retweet, or interaction feeds a hidden score. Post the wrong thing, and your reach is throttled, invisible to followers, blocked from the For You Page, and your voice is confined to a digital coffin. The worst part? X won’t even tell us what we’re doing wrong.
Tweepcred was open-sourced two years ago as part of Elon’s big push for “transparency.” The release confirmed what many suspected for over a decade: the system wasn’t neutral. It could be gamified, and it rewarded those who knew how to play it. Industry insiders and large organizations held a massive advantage over individuals, defeating the very purpose of the internet and the cultural revolution that once challenged mass media.
Content was no longer ...
🇺🇸👨🌾 Meriwether Farms on X:
Dear Trump,
We love you and support you— but your suggestion to buy beef from Argentina to stabilize beef prices would be an absolute betrayal to the American cattle rancher.
We understand there are larger economic and geopolitical dynamics at play, including countering CCP influence in countries in our hemisphere. But the practice of solving problems “over there” before solving problems here on our soil is what contributed to the downfall of our country: Americans always come last.
We understand beef prices are high, and we admire your concern for all Americans, but this is not the fault of the American producer. This is the fault of politicians who have allowed BRICS-aligned entities to dominate the meat industry, that participate in price fixing and who also continually lie to their consumers.
Washington for decades has facilitated the squeezing of our own ranchers while allowing these entities to flood the market with cheaper, ...