Marc Ginsberg denounces that extremist behavior is promoted through Telegram. The claim is about how the platform violates Apple’s policies.
Marc Ginsberg, Former US ambassador and President of the US nonprofit group, Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW), filed a federal lawsuit on Sunday, January 17; in demand to the Apple Company to remove from its App Store the Telegram application for being a sharing source of violent, extremist and racist messages.
The diplomat and CSW assure that extremist groups, white supremacists and neo-Nazis, which broke into the United States Congress on January 6, used said app to send messages of violence and racism once they committed the violent events in the capitol.
According to the lawsuit of the organization that makes life in Washington, Telegram “promotes extremist behavior in violation of both state and federal laws.”
Likewise, in the complaint, they assure that the application “connects members of these groups and facilitates the ability of these groups to communicate, and make an easier recruit of members as well as to plan and carry out attacks and instill fear in their enemies.”
Ginsberg Believes that the Platform Transgressed Apple’s App Store Review Policies
Ginsberg has attacked Apple over Telegram before. In July last year, he sent a letter to the CEO of the company, Tim Cook, where he asked to “keep Telegram’s financial feet against the fire”.
This statement appeared after an investigation that led to the conclusion that there is a nest for anti-semitic groups across all Europe that spread propaganda in that application.
Coalition for a Safer Web, the Coalition that Ginsberg rules, is a non-partisan organization that is in charge of denouncing and demanding the elimination of content that incites violence, extremism, and terrorism on social media platforms.
Is Parler Affecting Telegram’s Content?
The lawsuit that involvesTelegram seeks to emulate the same effect as the complaints against Parler, which is a US-based microblogging and social media service that was used to call for violence and other extremist purposes, which set the scenarios for the invasion of the US Congress that took place earlier this month.
Supporters of President Trump also menaced through Parler to lead extremist actions tomorrow at the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
After the complaint against Parler, companies such as Apple and Google removed the social network from their platforms. The coalition is trying to achieve the same goal against Telegram, but this may represent quite a challenge since it is outside their jurisdiction, according to the Washington Post.
What we Know about the Actual Lawsuit and which Effect will it Has over Telegram
The CSW complaint is blocked by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts communication platforms from legal responsibilities for the content they host.
For her part, Daphne Keller, a researcher on platform regulation at Stanford Law School thinks that the complaint could carve too deep.” However, Keller thinks that it shares similarities with previous lawsuits that seek to force platforms to retract their decisions to remove applications and social media accounts,” the US media reported.
By: Jenson Nuñez
