The nonprofit human rights organization Coalition for a Safe Web, represented by its head, Mark Ginsberg, filed a lawsuit against Apple and Alphabet, the associated company of Google. The coalition, which advocates for online security, demanded that the messenger be removed from the AppStore and Google Play.
According to human rights activists, Telegram provides opportunities for racism to flourish and extremist ideas to spread. In turn, Pavel Durov, the creator and head of Telegram, emphasizes that hundreds of thousands of messages calling for violence were deleted by the administration. Also, the messenger constantly cleans channels that violate the laws of the country.
The reason for such claims was the revolt of Trump supporters, who staged riots in Washington in early January. From that moment on, all the accounts of the former president were blocked, and even an entire social network was deleted, which was used to coordinate the participants of the riot.
If the court satisfies the plaintiff's claims, people will not have access to one of the few messengers that do not share data with state authorities. Recall that in 2021, the number of Telegram users reached 500 million.
Illustration: actualapple.com