A Brazilian court issued a suspension order for Telegram on Wednesday after the firm refused to provide personal information on users who had been disseminating extreme hate speech. A youngster who committed a mass shooting at a Brazilian school was found to have participated in hate speech groups on Telegram, according to an inquiry, thus the Brazilian court asked these individuals for their data.
Telegram has previously been prohibited in Brazil. The platform was shut down by a Brazilian court last year after it was charged with disobeying local rules by allowing the transmission of harmful and false information. The app remained offline for less than 48 hours at that moment until Telegram agreed to work with Brazilian regulators.
However, this time, things are different. The creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov, posted a message on his own channel claiming that it is “technologically impossible” to obtain the data sought by the Brazilian court. Durov added that due to local laws, Telegram had already left nations like China, Iran, and Russia and that it might eventually leave Brazil for the same reason.
The app’s creator claims that leaving a nation is “preferable to the betrayal of our users and the beliefs we were founded on.”
