2023-04-27 13:17:37
A year after a first temporary blockage, Brazilian justice has again asked Internet service providers (ISPs) and online application stores to cut off all access to the Telegram messaging application in the country. A new episode in the very conflicting relationship between justice and business in Brazil.
On Wednesday April 26, a federal court ordered the blocking of Telegram, considering that the application did not collaborate sufficiently with an important ongoing investigation into neo-Nazi groups. Investigators had requested, with the agreement of a judge, that Telegram provide them with a series of information on users participating in a violently anti-Semitic discussion group, suspected of planning attacks and of having played a role in an attack anti-Semitism committed by a teenager in November 2022. The young man had shot and killed four people, including a 12-year-old student, in a school in Aracruz (Espirito Santo, South-East).
The court also sentenced the company to a fine of approximately 200,000 euros per day as long as it did not provide the requested information. Telegram has, for the time being, only partially responded to the requests of the investigators, for example not providing the telephone numbers of the administrators of two discussion channels.
Major misinformation issues
In March 2022, in a very tense political context, six months before the Brazilian presidential election, the Supreme Court had already ordered a temporary blocking of the application in the country. At the time, justice accused him of a series of serious shortcomings in his moderation, in particular his refusal to block accounts supporting President Jair Bolsonaro disseminating disinformation on a large scale and, already, of lacking goodwill in his cooperation. with ongoing investigations, particularly in terms of child pornography.
At the time, Telegram had pleaded error in good faith, claiming that it had not responded to legal requests within the time limits allowed after an email was lost. The company had reacted very quickly: Pavel Durov, the co-founder of the application created in Russia but whose headquarters are now in Dubai, had personally apologized and dispatched Ilya Perekopsky, one of the company’s main executives, to Brazil. , who had met Jair Bolsonaro in June. The blockage was quickly lifted. The company had also committed to more and better moderating its platform in the country, in particular by monitoring the main Brazilian discussion channels to detect and remove political misinformation.
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