Mooney_Driver wrote:
Some streaming services like Youtube and other video platforms are at least trying to do some of this but focus on pornography rather than conspiracy and other fake news, because in the US it is a bigger issue to blank out certain body parts rather than to stop vicious and even criminal misinformation and propaganda.
So many words that even within a single country are hard to define – but on a global scale completely impossible to agree on! Views of people and governments on what is “misinformation and propaganda” and what is not are completely different across the globe – even more so the definition of “criminal misinformation” (which in some countries doesn’t exist at all. What is perceived as “misinformation” by some is seen as “unquestionable truth” by others.
That is the reason, why it is so stupid to try to kill the messenger.
And btw.: I’m pretty sure that Deutche Post, Royal Mail or Die Post are delivering “misinformation” to more people in their respective countries every day than telegram does. So why don’t we discuss to shut down these?
johnh wrote:
In terms of traffic, porn (pornhub etc) is significant but more like 10-15%.
This number sounds realistic for Central Europe (and the US). In Asia (and the original statistic pretended to be a “worldwide” one) that accounts for >50% of all internet traffic and an even higher share of all mobile traffic Netflix (and other commercial streaming services) is not that big and therefore I’d estimate the share of adult content to be even higher (esp. in India) – in any case much more than the <2.5% the initial “statistics” pretended.
Controlling the message is important, although not normally associated with liberal democracies…
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
— George Orwell, 1984
As suggested above, if you want to know if a policy makes sense, you should replace “” with “Telephone” or “Mail”.
The main issue here is that the state, with varying levels of judicial oversight, can legally intercept phone and mail conversations, while some of the “” is not subject to this potential supervision.
They can’t suppress illegal messages over the phone or via mail, I don’t see why the state should be able to do that on Telegram.
Which of the two does Germany want to do?
Which of the two does Germany want to do?
They want to be seen to be doing something. What, isn’t too important. Plus, they understand absolutely none of the technology.
At least Germany didn’t ban apps that warn car drivers for speed cameras on the road. 
media in general should be held responsible for what they report or tolerate on their platforms
They are, but forums (and similar) have legal protection, subject to various (country dependent) conditions. Obviously this is necessary because you cannot in general stop somebody from joining up and posting some defamatory material. No forum can be modded 24/7.
Telegram probably has no liability because it is a messaging platform. Even in its “groups”, stuff is seen only by those who chose to join them. That does not absolve it from libel laws (in the UK) because libel needs only 2 people in total, but the odds of somebody actioning a defamatory telegram group post is vanishingly small, because the potential complainant willingly joined the said group, and there is no open public access.
He laughed and said “more like 30 seconds”.
Which makes the volume of internet porn video traffic even more remarkable
johnh wrote:
I asked him whether it’s true that people watch porn for an average of no more than 7 minutes, which I’d heard. He laughed and said “more like 30 seconds”.
Which is absolutely correct, hence the difference between TRAFFIC numbers and DATA usage. Porn as far as DATA goes is a relatively low number of overall data, exactly because of this whereas average viewing time YT, etc has gone up massively. Porn surprisingly is still less mobile as well and it is a bigger part of Web Data use than of Mobile Web. The fact the web experience isn’t inherently native to a mobile device (and very few people are confident enough to download a Porn app) is likely why that is the case. There are likely other use cases of why porn consumption is mostly in the house which I don’t think we need to expand on…
Peter wrote:
Which makes the volume of internet porn video traffic even more remarkable
Traffic is UU’s (unique users) which goes to show a lot of people consume porn, the data (downstream downloads/uploads) is a much different story.
Malibuflyer wrote:
That is the reason, why it is so stupid to try to kill the messenger.
Exactly. Killing IM’s is pointless. Even countries with harsh internet censorship can’t really do it in any meaningful way.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Views of people and governments on what is “misinformation and propaganda” and what is not are completely different across the globe – even more so the definition of “criminal misinformation” (which in some countries doesn’t exist at all. What is perceived as “misinformation” by some is seen as “unquestionable truth” by others.
Yep, same story there.
Which does not mean one can be highly frustrated by all the b.s which makes it onto the net and the consequences of it. If we reflect on the original purpose of the Internet to make INFORMATION available to everyone, it is staggering what naivity the geniuses who thought of the internet as we know it back in Geneva displayed towards the use of such a thing. They were brilliant in their fields but knew preciously little about humans.
