See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.
I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.
One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.
I think 30+ people died directly in India due to fake message rumors on WhatsApp last year. The rumours were basically of child kidnapping rings doing the rounds and if someone new wandered in into a secluded community, they would be suspected and in rare cases, killed. Since India saw an exceptional implosion in smartphone usage in recent years and WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform there, it’s a travesty that it happened.
Stringent supporters of privacy will tell you it has no ill effects, and any policies obstructing it aren’t preventing illegal activity, including child pornography. Maybe they feel like they just have to say this, as it’s the most-effective thing to say, but it seems fairly obviously to be untrue, and I would argue counter-productive. I’m confident whatever government (French or otherwise) cares more about knowing and controlling everything than they do about preventing crime, but to say it couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent crime I can only interpret as a bad faith argument. So bad faith on both sides, as per usual.
Personally, I just think the good outweighs the bad. We just can’t expect literally everyone to forfeit any sense of privacy because some criminals are going to use it to commit crimes. That’s a super dangerous precedent. You’re just going to have to find other ways to track them down, or accept that crime as a casualty of privacy and freedom.
See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.
I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.
Its actually because telegram isnt encrypted, and the ceo didnt reply to takedown requests of cp and drug exchanges
How do you define social media in a way that includes DMs but doesn’t include basically all communication?
One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.
I think 30+ people died directly in India due to fake message rumors on WhatsApp last year. The rumours were basically of child kidnapping rings doing the rounds and if someone new wandered in into a secluded community, they would be suspected and in rare cases, killed. Since India saw an exceptional implosion in smartphone usage in recent years and WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform there, it’s a travesty that it happened.
Don’t blame the messenger.
Stringent supporters of privacy will tell you it has no ill effects, and any policies obstructing it aren’t preventing illegal activity, including child pornography. Maybe they feel like they just have to say this, as it’s the most-effective thing to say, but it seems fairly obviously to be untrue, and I would argue counter-productive. I’m confident whatever government (French or otherwise) cares more about knowing and controlling everything than they do about preventing crime, but to say it couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent crime I can only interpret as a bad faith argument. So bad faith on both sides, as per usual.
Personally, I just think the good outweighs the bad. We just can’t expect literally everyone to forfeit any sense of privacy because some criminals are going to use it to commit crimes. That’s a super dangerous precedent. You’re just going to have to find other ways to track them down, or accept that crime as a casualty of privacy and freedom.