Following the removal of Parler from the App Store earlier this month, a nonprofit group sued in Washington last Sunday, demanding that the company ban the popular messaging app Telegram from its platform.
First reported by the Washington Post, the group “Coalition for a Safer Web” claims that Telegram has become a place for extremists to spread their ideas on the Internet.
The Coalition for a Safer Web, a non-partisan group that advocates technology and policies to remove extremist content from social media, and the coalition’s president, Marc Ginsberg, a former US ambassador to Morocco.
According to the lawsuit, the non-partisan group accuses Telegram of hosting conversations of ‘white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hateful content’, which would be considered a violation of the App Store’s terms of service. A similar case will be filed against Google in the next few days.
The case has been filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California and requires Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store, just as the company did with Parler this month. Parler is known for giving users permission to incite violence without filters, and Apple has banned the iOS app, claiming the app is ‘threats of violence and illegal activity’.
Although Telegram is a messaging application, it also provides channels and public groups that users can access via a shareable URL or by using the app’s built-in search. It’s still unclear if Apple will ban Telegram in the App Store, but Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, has already mentioned that they are “working on a feature-rich web app that will work in Safari” if Apple launches the iOS app prohibit.
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