Following the removal of Parler from the App Store earlier this month, a Washington-based non-profit group sued Apple last Sunday asking the company to ban the popular messaging app Telegram from its platform.
By Filipe Espósito
First reported by the Washington Post, the “Coalition for a Safer Web” group argues that Telegram has become a place for extremists to spread their ideas on the web.
Filing the suit was the Coalition for a Safer Web, a nonpartisan group that advocates for technologies and policies to remove extremist content from social media, and the coalition’s president, Marc Ginsberg, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco.
According to the lawsuit, the non-partisan group accuses Telegram of hosting conversations of “white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hateful content,” which would be considered a violation of App Store’s terms of service. A similar suit will be filed against Google in the next few days.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California and requires Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store, just as the company did with Parler this month. Parler is known for allowing users to share content inciting violence without filters, and Apple banned the iOS app claiming that the app represents “threats of violence and illegal activity.”
Although Telegram is a messaging app, it also offers channels and public groups that users can access through a shareable URL or using the app’s built-in search. It’s still unclear whether Apple will ban Telegram from the App Store, but Telegram founder Pavel Durov has already mentioned that they’re “working on a feature-rich web app which will run in Safari” in case Apple bans the app from iOS.
