Last week, Telegram moderators blocked hundreds of publications calling for violence after the riots in the United States, said Pavel Durov, creator of the messenger and social network VKontakte.
According to him, Telegram welcomes peaceful debates and protests, but it is forbidden to disseminate calls to violent actions in the messenger.
From the beginning of the month, the platform’s moderators began to receive messages about “US-related public activity.” The team acted “decisively, cutting off American channels promoting violence.”
“Thanks to these efforts, our moderators last week blocked hundreds of public calls for violence that could otherwise reach tens of thousands of users,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel on Monday, January 18.
He also noted that the moderators continue to remove content that “provokes violence.”
On January 14, it was reported that Telegram flagged a channel called Donald J. Trump, attributed to US President Donald Trump, as fraudulent. The channel has over 550 thousand subscribers.
On January 12, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that Telegram became the second most downloaded app in the United States, thanks to a massive transition of supporters of the current American President Donald Trump.
According to the publication, the rise in popularity of the messenger occurred after the blocking of Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts and the shutdown of the Parler social network, which is popular among the supporters of the current head of state.
Durov noted that blocking the Parler application by Apple and Google poses a much greater danger to freedom of speech than censorship on social networks.
On January 6, Trump supporters stormed into the Capitol building after the rally. Despite the unrest, the US Congress approved the election of Democrat Joe Biden as head of state.