Is Durov’s private jet intercepted? The case of the Alternative for Germany, a campaign against extremism on Telegram

Sellner was barred from entering Germany in March after he spoke about the Alternative fr Deutschland at the November Potsdam conference. The far-right party in Germany is planning to conduct mass deportations after it came into power, according to a plan he presented there. The far right got its first win in Germany since World War II on Sunday, as the party belonging to the Alternative for Germany gained victory in a state election.

Similar messages began proliferating across the app. Martin Sellner, who is an Austrian right-wing Extremist, wrote that the democracy simulation is being switched off by the liberal West. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be arrested next?” The message was viewed more than 40,000 times as estimated by TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool, which provided the view counts cited in this story.

The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by Allied powers. German police found a cache of more than $500,000 in cash and gold, as well as hundreds of guns, knives and helmets when they stopped the coup plot.

Alarm spread quickly the Saturday of Durov’s arrest. Just 90 minutes after French media reported that Durov’s private jet had been intercepted by authorities at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport, a far-right channel posted that his arrest “may have political reasons and be a tool to gain access to personal data of Telegram users.”

The founder and executive director of the United Nations–backed organization Tech Against Terrorism tells WIRED that if you are a terrorist or a radical, you will probably follow Telegram’s path of least resistance.

Researchers at Germany’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) track around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to the German far right and conspiracy movements. Germany has strict criminal code, and users are known for posting racist and antisemitic hate speech and groups that contain Nazi symbols. But a mass exodus from the platform, where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for radicalization and offline demonstrations, would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.

The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload who is set to be extradited from New Zealand, and who knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal activity on the internet.

We Are All Here, We Are Just Here: Towards a Better World Without Wall Street Walls, Just As They Used to Be

I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thank you for the love and the meme.

We hear voices that it isn’t enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.

Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. We are prepared to leave that country. We’ve done it many times. Telegram got banned in Russia because we refused to hand over “cryptenion keys” which were demanded by Russia. Telegram got banned in Iran after we refused to block channels of peaceful protesters. We are not doing this for money so we are prepared to leave markets that are not compatible with our principles. We are driven to bring good and defend the rights of people in places where they’re being violated.

1. If there is unhappiness with the internet service in a certain country, the established practice is to start a legal action against it. It’s misguided to use the laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on his platform. Building technology is hard enough as it is. If an individual can be held responsible for abuse of tools, no innovator will ever build new ones.

France’s telecoms hotline has failed to respond to requests from the European Parliament, as reported by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau

1. The French authorities were able to reach me through many different channels. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.

2. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Anyone can search for its email address in the EU and find it publicly available.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement last week outlining the wide-ranging charges that Telegram exhibited an “almost total failure to respond to judicial requests.”

The 39-year old man from France was indicted in Paris on August 28 for spreading child abuse images, drug traffickers and failure to comply with law enforcement. He was ordered to post bail equivalent to $5.5 million and placed under court monitoring. He is also not permitted to leave the country.

Telegram isn’t perfect and the company is fixing it so it is safer and stronger, according to the Russian billionaire.