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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Don't know why this isn't higher, imho this shows that Telegram is in the hands of a state-actor (in this case Russia), I haven't seen Twitter taking down any of the videos which showed people actively being violent against the police forces.

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).

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Its not that simple.

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.

How do they have more control over Telegram than over Twitter? They’re both internet based services.

Twitter is already blocked.

russian shill account?

No, you don't need to be a russian parrot in order to have this (in my opinion perfectly valid) view on things.

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.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, as have a bunch of your other comments unfortunately. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules?

>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.

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.

> 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.

Why not email?

If signal users can be counted on one hand, people using gpg can be counted on a finger.

I don't see a need for GPG at all. There are tons of options for sending email that is encrypted enough to lock out the Iranian government. Any popular mail service would work, and using several email addresses at different mail services would work best.

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.

And without knowing who you are, a requirement most services (including Signal) fail. Does Telegram allow you to create an account without divulging your phone number?

I don't know. I'm not a Telegram user and I wouldn't use any of these messaging services if I wanted to organise a protest.

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.

Why isn't Signal bigger? (currently living in a country that monitors everything and looking for some relief)

Network effect. There's more reason to sign up for WA/FB when everyone you know also has an account.

Yeah; I consider this major news / a show of what Telegram is or has become.

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.

That would be really strange if it was the case, because the actual reason why Telegram even exists is that vk.com founder got forcibly removed from his position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Dismissal_from_VK

Twitter might have been a bad example, considering they censor a lot, maybe not police videos, but still.

What Telegram did still shouldn't have happened though, I agree.

> Don't know why this isn't higher

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.

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