Telegram shuts down major Iranian anti government channel
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Also, it seems like Iran has "temporarily cut internet access to mobile phones, but full coverage was eventually restored." (https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-warns-against-illegal-gather...). I remember something similar was done by the Assad regime in Syria just before the 2011 revolt (or around that time).
For context the channel had over 1 mio followers. The protests in Iran has so far seen at least two deaths.
The Iranian government claims the deaths were caused by foreign agents and that the channel was shut down due to encouragements of violence.
Snowden had some good comments here about Telegram in Iran: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/947190333540061185
Telegram can only exist in Iran if it allows itself to be censored, basically. The alternative is for them to not exist at all in Iran.
The Iranian government cant force Twitter to do anything, but I assume they can shut down the Telegram app completely in Iran since they control the phone network and Internet there.
As long as the technical infrastructure for these apps are centralized, they are easy to shut down.
The core problem is that the Internet is both centralized and decentralized at the same time - while the Internet is able to route traffic away from broken cables etc. easily, it is vulnerable to hostile actors who are able to control an entire country's uplinks.
Something like Tor should have been built into the Internet from the beginning... but it wasn't, as the Internet was built on the implicit trust that no one would do harm.
Many companies face that choice. What I will never understand is why anyone would use a service like that to organise protests against a government that can enforce its censorship rules.
Scale effects. Everyone I know has Whatsapp, some have Telegram and I can count the number of Signal users I know on one hand. It's easier to get a mass protest done via chainmal in WA/Telegram than via Signal.
Also, organising a protest isn't about keeping individual messages secret. You can never keep something secret that you want thousands or hundereds of thousands of people to know about. It's all about getting the message across fast without the government blocking it.
Email is the only reasonably decentralised and diverse messaging infrastructure we have. It's impossible to block without shutting down the entire Internet in a country.
What Telegram did still shouldn't have happened though, I agree.
Because most people on HN and the moderators support censorship. Especially on social media and the internet. So far they've been successful in taking down silly accounts like milo and some "right wingers". But their ultimate goal is to get censorship controls like iran. It doesn't serve their interest to criticize iran for doing what they want to do themselves.
You have to keep in mind hacker news is a misnomer. This site hasn't been run by tech. The mods are former unemployed media employees. They know nothing about technology. And most of the people here are left leaning anti-free speech types.
There is no hacker ethos to hacker news. It died many years ago.
"Please note that this does not apply to local restrictions on freedom of speech. For example, if criticizing the government is illegal in some country, Telegram won‘t be a part of such politically motivated censorship. This goes against our founders’ principles. While we do block terrorist (e.g. ISIS-related) bots and channels, we will not block anybody who peacefully expresses alternative opinions."[0]
I believe that, if there were actually violence calls, they're being unbiased by strictly following their own public rules.
[0] https://telegram.org/faq#q-wait-0-o-do-you-process-take-down...
It's a shame the iPhone won't let background applications run, before it became popular even my mother was just fine using IRC to talk with the family.