Lawsuit against Apple: Tech group should remove Telegram from App Store

SAN FRANCISCO. The organization "Coalition for a Safer Web" has sued the US technology group Apple, demanding that the Telegram messaging service be removed. The reason for the lawsuit is that Appel is not doing anything against Telegram and continues to offer the application in the App Store. In doing so, Apple is violating its own guidelines against hatred and violence.

The "Coalition for a Safer Web" (CSW) submitted the lawsuit to the US District Court of Northern California on Sunday, reported the industry portal AppleInsider. CSW sees itself as a non-partisan, non-profit advocacy group whose task it is to “promote new public-private partnerships in order to facilitate the rapid removal of extremist and terrorist content”.

Telegram is used, among other things, to intimidate, threaten and coerce, the portal quoted CSW ambassador Marc Ginsberg as saying. He pointed out to Apple CEO Tim Cook in a letter last July that Telegram was engaging in “extremist violence” and should therefore no longer have a platform. According to CSW, the messenger service is a "communication channel for the Russian government and affiliated neo-Nazi and nationalist groups that are sowing misinformation and racist divisions in the United States and Europe".

Telegram is very popular
The lawsuit forced Apple to take a closer look at Telegram and possibly to take similar measures against it, as Apple did with the Parler app. Parler was removed from Google and Apple after the storming of the Capitol by supporters of the outgoing US President Donald Trump. Users of smartphones with Android or iOS operating systems can only install the apps in a cumbersome way.

Telegram had received massive support especially since the announcement of the change of the terms and conditions by the WhatsApp messaging service, which belongs to the Facebook group. Critics point out that Telegram also serves as an alternative platform for those users who are blocked on Twitter or Facebook, for example.

Source: Junge Freiheit