Hacker News Reader

Comment by estranhosidade | Hacker News Reader

The article is written in German, but with a Google Translate you can understand the just of it. Apparently Telegram added a new blocking system based on phone numbers, sorta a geo-blocking thing, and people with German phone numbers registered on their Telegram accounts aren't able to access those blocked channels.

Also, unlike the previous block this one applies even to the users who are using the app downloaded directly from Telegram site and not the iOS/Google Play version.

The blocking happens after German minister of interior had a meeting with Telegram directors a few days ago.

View on HN

Probably makes sense. I'm not super familiar with Telegram, but to know a channel is doing stuff that's against German law probably means that someone with access to the channel reported it to authorities.

Germany is also one of those countries that blanket bans particular groups/parties in general, which the US didn't really do until after 9/11. Banning a group chat isn't much different.

> Probably makes sense. I'm not super familiar with Telegram, but to know a channel is doing stuff that's against German law probably means that someone with access to the channel reported it to authorities.

Avocadolf's channels are public, you could access them on the Telegram web UI even without an account. The German government has tried to get the channel shut down for months now, after Hildmann fled the country and engaged in Holocaust denial (which is a crime here).

The problem is that unlike all other major social networks, Telegram refuses to comply with German laws (in particular the NetzDG) and has refused to name a contact person for the authorities so that egregious violations could be stopped. I read an article that claimed the only form of contact between German authorities and Telegram used to be a bilateral anti-terror coordination with the US FBI, which makes sense given the common problem of radical Islamist terrorism.

The challenge with Telegram is that it has server costs, but it has no income cash flow. They're experimenting. But overall its 100% investment money. And so if they cannot be tried criminally, there's no business loss if they can't take German cash. This is obviously an issue with Facebook who cares about cash quite a bit, or Reddit, or whatever. But not Telegram.

So yeah.

My guess is that at this point Germany is saying that this could fall into the criminal side of things, at which point Telegram would care.

I need a huge fact-check on this, but I seem to remember that while the "no cash flow" statement is trivially true, in practice isn't the investment capital already enough to cover several decades of funding?

> My guess is that at this point Germany is saying that this could fall into the criminal side of things, at which point Telegram would care.

Not sure where telegram is registered, but can a foreign company have a criminal responsiblity by just being accessible in that country? I'm sure most of the internet violates some kind of ancient anti-something law, be it nudity or whatever, but noone really cares if boobs are illegal in afghanistan, why care if something is illegal in germany, if you're an (eg.) british company?

I mean if Telegram doesn't have a business in Germany, why should they care what laws Germany passes?

Porn sites are probably against the law in Saudi Arabia, but why is that Pornhubs problem?

If you want to do business in a country you usually have to follow the laws of the country. If you are not following these laws and you get booted out of their respective markets you can't cry censorship it's that easy.

Sure you can, and it is censorship if a country is banning your platform for not censoring public discourse. That is exactly what is happening here. It would be like liberals in the US blocking Telegram nationwide for allowing anti-mandate discussion and then saying the reason has not nothing to do with censorship.

This isn't about "anti-mandate" discussion, it's about blocking the channel of someone (Avocadolf) who's got an open arrest warrant for inciting hatred and denying the holocaust as well as death threats to politicians (actual threats, not just dancing around the issue). I believe death threats are illegal even in the US.

Death threats are illegal pretty much everywhere but not necessarily subject to censorship. The threat is the crime, not the content. If someone is already dead, I can safely print a whole hardcover book of death threats against them.

On the other hand, forcibly removing content for the sake of the content is censorship. It can be censorship that most people approve of - which they usually do when the content is sufficiently vile and irredeemable - but it's still censorship.

Correct, the threat is the crime. And German Police was investigating channels that were consistently committing this exact crime on Telegram. Telegram was told these crimes were happening in specific channels and Telegram did nothing. They were now given the choice of no business in germany or removing the channels crime was being committed on.

And yes, content was censored on. But not only death threats were censored but also holocaust denial, eugenics and inciting hatred against ethnic groups (Jewish groups, specifically).

> It would be like liberals in the US blocking Telegram nationwide for allowing anti-mandate discussion and then saying the reason has not nothing to do with censorship.

People on the blocked Telegram channels have denied the Holocaust (including the channel operator himself) which is a crime in Germany, Austria and 16 other European countries [1] or called for the murder, disfigurement or other injuries to politicians [2].

"Anti-mandate discussions" are bad enough, but unlike what went on in Hildmann's channels this stuff isn't criminal so the comparison of yours is a bit wrong.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetze_gegen_Holocaustleugnun...

[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/hunderte-morda...

You can definitely cry censorship. Having a government process of censorship doesn't mean you can insist it's not censorship. Plenty of government groups responsible for censoring have the word "censor" in the name.

Yes but you cry censorship to the German government, not to Telegram.

The comment I was replying to was about a business crying censorship about being kicked out of a country for not following its laws. Not about the users of Telegram crying to Telegram.

Except Telegram does not do business in Germany. Even if Germany gets Telegram kicked off the German App Store, they have no way to block Telegram's web servers, which do not need to comply with Germany's jurisdiction.

If they don't go down the route of implementing a state-level firewall such as China is doing, they're fighting a losing battle. And frankly, if Telegram were inaccessible from Germany, the same people would simply use the next messaging app. There's nothing groundbreaking within Telegram that cannot be replicated.

IMHO, this is the government embarrassing themselves with the fact that they've lost the goodwill of a huge chunk of the population and trying to blame Telegram for it - as if the mindset and communication of those unsatisfied people would simply change/disappear if they were no longer able to access Telegram. Which furthermore shows that today's governments still do not understand the internet.

> Even if Germany gets Telegram kicked off the German App Store, they have no way to block Telegram's web servers, which do not need to comply with Germany's jurisdiction.

For what it's worth, the NRW Landesmedienanstalt is busy establishing a DNS-level censorship infrastructure against Pornhub, Youporn, MyDirtyHobby and others [1]. It won't take long until providers will be forced to also add Telegram's infrastructure to that list.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landesmedienanstalt-kann...

Does this apply to China as well?

See Apple, Blizzard, Disney, Microsoft

...or the US?

It doesn't seem like Telegram is actually doing business in Germany. I feel like simply having German citizens using your app doesn't mean that the nation state of Germany has the same authority over your business as if you were actually registered as a GmbH in their territory.

I believe the German government has a novel interpretation of their jurisdiction as covering any website with content in the German language (see the Project Gutenberg debacle).

On one hand, they can believe in many things, including jurisdictions, on the other hand, what can they actually do, against a company that is registered in some other country and abiding the laws there?

Presumably they could arrest you if you're ever in Germany.

> Germany is also one of those countries that blanket bans particular groups/parties in general

You make it sound like Germany is constantly banning political parties. There have been exactly two bans of political parties in the post-war history of Germany: A nazi party in 1952 and a communist party in 1956. Also don't forget who occupied Germany in this decade and made a lot of its decisions.

But there are many banned named groups. Germany is not unique in this. That's a thing foreign to the US that Americans may not understand, which is why I mentioned it. I can start a group called the "Destroy The Government Now Neo-Nazis" in the US with no fear that it will ever be banned.

> I can start a group called the "Destroy The Government Now Neo-Nazis" in the US with no fear that it will ever be banned.

Gang injunctions (sufficiently, but not exclusively) prove that this is not true.

Neo-Nazis are good white Christian folks. Domestic terrorism and gang laws don't apply to them.

(I wish I was joking.)

“The US is structurally sympathetic to Neo-Nazis” is a different, and more difficult to refute, argument than “the US doesn't ban groups”.

A group like that won't stay up a day on a FAANG platform

Another reason to use Element (Matrix), where phone number is not required.

Does Matrix have groups like Telegram's? I thought Matrix was just a messenger app.

Matrix has "rooms".

Do rooms work like a blog/feeds/readers? I thought they were more like Signal's groups.

I think threaded discussions are planned, but so far it is only for linear discussions.

That's very different from the relevant Telegram groups. Those function more like a blog on the web — non-subscribers can search for them, only the group's owner(s) can post, and everyone else can just read. And they work for very large audiences, 100k readers is no problem.

I see. With matrix rooms it is possible to set permissions in a way that only the owner can send messages in that room. There are also large(-ish) rooms, such as #/room/#matrix:matrix.org with > 30k users, but I think threaded discussions would allow for a functionality that resembles a blog where subscribers can comment on articles. And there is a preview functionality that technically allows users to read public rooms without being subscribed.

Of course Telegram is quite a bit more polished and fun to use than element or other matrix clients so far.

The headline of your post is very misleading since the linked articles headline translates to “Telegram blocks(!) channels”, not cencors.

By mistranslating this to “censoring” you are using the language of those who are actively distributing fake news.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I hope that you’ll correct the title of the post.

Well telegram has to abide by German law, otherwise authorities will seize all their assets in Germany (and maybe even Europe?) and shut them down and sue them international court for ignoring the will of a Nation. I don't think Telegram had much choice in the matter. Thanks for the summary.

I never used Telegram. How do channels work? Does Telegram has that kind of visibility into what is happening in them?

Telegram does not have any meaningful e2e encryption (apart from 1-1 on-demand stuff nobody uses). So yes, everything is visible to Telegram.

"(apart from 1-1 on-demand stuff nobody uses). "

It gets used. Because this secret chat does not save its history, it leaves no trace on the devive. So people who want to cheat on their partner, but know that their partner checks their mobile at times even installed telegram because of this feature (and they do not know what e2e means).

Surprisingly many people have this motivation. So many, that I know of persons who got problems with installing telegram, because their partner assumed - it was for this reason.

I don’t quite understand what the point of telegram is then? Is the only benefit it isn’t owned by Facebook?

There is no point in end to end encryption in public channels, so this specific criticism is not valid.

> I don’t quite understand what the point of telegram is then?

It's UX is far superior to any cross-platform competitor. On top of that, its client is open source and the servers have easy and free bot APIs. It also has channels, which broadcast your messages to followers and many secure competitors don't have such functionality.

It's not encrypted, but as it turns out most people don't really care about that in practice. If they would, texting wouldn't be popular in places like the USA. That's probably why people go to Telegram instead of Signal, ease of use is more important than privacy for most, especially in group chats that are generally about what's for dinner.

Having E2EE in a large Telegram channel would be like having an E2EE Facebook group, subreddit or even a web forum.

If something leaks, it's through users, not through someone listening in or MITMing the communication.

Telegram has, as far as I know, no revenue model at all so they most likely are mining the heck out of the users and what they post.

Telegram has ads as of a few months ago, because Durov can't personally fund it anymore at its current size.

https://promote.telegram.org/

I haven't seen a single ad at all for some reason in the multiple groups I am in.

At the moment, ads are only displayed in public channels with at least 1.000 users, so they are still pretty rare to come by (like, I use Telegram regularly and only see them every other day). Plus, I've heard that some clients aren't supporting them yet (even if Telegram's stance is that every client should), so maybe you'll never see them.

As far as I understand: many people use Telegram channels as a sort of Twitter-like social media, since you can set the channel to publicly available and anyone with app can read what you wrote, and even interact with you through, like voting through giving your post an emoji or commenting on it (if you enabled comments).

Channels are extremely public, in the sense that you can access them even without installing telegram [1] and there are websites which can generate RSS feeds for all the posts of a channel or things like that [2]. So this is not exactly a private conversation we're talking about, more like the printing of broadsheets to be nailed to every other house's wall.

[1] For example, this is a post in Telegram's own public channel https://t.me/telegram/167 [2] For example, this two: https://tg.i-c-a.su/ and https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-Telegram-rss-feed

Telegram blocked calls to violence before, so technically it's nothing new.

Gist of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com