Telegram, just like any other social network, grapples with the fact that terrorists use their platforms to aid in pushing their agenda in the form of hiring recruits or spreading propaganda messages.
Indonesian Ministry of Communication and IT blocked Telegram earlier and this prompted Telegram Messenger’s founder, Pavel Durov, to post an update about the situation at hand.
“It turns out that the officials of the Ministry recently emailed us a list of public channels with terrorism-related content on Telegram, and our team was unable to quickly process them,” he said in a post. This has led to the company moving forward to implement a 3 step solution to fix this situation.
Telegram will block terrorist related public channels which they were reported by Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and IT. Durov also wants to establish a direct channel of communication with the Ministry so that they can work better in identifying and blocking such terrorist propaganda in the future. Lastly, they will form a “dedicated team of moderators” who are versed in the Indonesian language so that they can process reports of terrorism related content.
Clearly, Durov is taking this matter very seriously and the spread of such content might give a social network like Telegram a bad name to governments. Apparently, Durov says that they block “thousands of ISIS related public channels” which are shown on this Telegram channel. “We are constantly striving to be more efficient at preventing terrorist propaganda, and are always open to ideas on how to get better at this,” he says.
