Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov just released a statement about why the Brazilian Supreme Court blocked the app, and the reason is incredible. In the statement, which you can read in full below, he says the reason was because his company checked the wrong email address.
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“It seems we had a problem with emails going between our corporate telegram.org addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court,” Durov says, then explaining that his company asked the court to send future takedown requests “to a dedicated email address.” But the court didn’t do that, apparently — it continued to use “the old general-purpose email address,” and Telegram didn’t see the emails and is now blocked, unless the court changes its mind.
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The company says it has now found those emails (meaning the old address worked, which makes it even more puzzling that the emails somehow got lost) and is trying to rectify the situation with the court. There is a lot of political context surrounding the blocking, which stems from accusations that Telegram facilitates the spread of misinformation.
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See below in detail what the company said about the blocking:
It seems that we had a problem with emails passing between our corporate telegram.org addresses and the Supreme Court of Brazil. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court decided to block Telegram for not responding.
On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We certainly could have done a better job.
We complied with a previous court order in late February and responded with a proposal to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to contact us. As a result, we lost their decision in early March that contained a request for tracking to be removed. Fortunately, we have now found it and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.
Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends, and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its decision for a few days at its discretion, to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and establishing a framework to respond to future pressing issues like this in an expeditious manner.
The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team has been inundated with requests from many places. However, I am confident that once a reliable communication channel is established, we will be able to effectively process removal requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil.
Source of information: theverge.com
