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“important today”
Love on Tinder, hate on Telegram – is Messenger really as bad as its reputation?
Freedom of expression to the bitter end – is Telegram as bad as its reputation?
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Telegram – a network that enables the opposition in Russia and a murder plot in Germany. But is the platform as bad as its reputation?
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Blackbox Telegram – outside of the roughly eight million German users: inside, very few people know how this social network works. What many people in Germany associate with it are people like Attila Hildmann and Michael Wendler, who distribute their content there almost unfiltered, while the network itself hardly draws any conclusions from it. Prof. Matthias Kettemann, program director at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research, has more insight. He explains in the podcast “today important” the differences to other services. The messenger service Whatsapp is primarily for communication between individuals – Facebook is for large groups. And Telegram? Be both in one, says Kettemann.
“Your value is absolute freedom of expression”
So far, this has made Telegram a real black box for the authorities, because information is consistently refused by those responsible, and official letters and demands are simply ignored. In Germany, the platform is therefore particularly attractive for groups who want to communicate in secret. From fake IDs to weapons, you can buy almost anything there if you only know where. Hatred and hate speech are spread wildly, not only in the groups of Hildmann and Co.: “Telegram allows pretty much everything except for the sexual exploitation of children and IS propaganda,” says the expert for digital communication spaces, Prof. Kettemann. Their value is absolute freedom of expression.
But that’s exactly why the network has a completely different reputation in other countries – it is mainly used by opposition and critical voices in Russia and Belarus. Because behind it is the Russian Mark Zuckerberg, so to speak, according to Prof. Kettemann: “Mr. Durow, the founder of ‘VKontakte’. This is a Russian Facebook equivalent. He is a startup millionaire and founded Telegram eight years ago as a data protection sensitive Alternative.”
Its reputation is worse than much of the content
In Germany, other groups take advantage of this confidentiality. For example, radical opponents of vaccinations were exposed in Dresden who spread death threats against the Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer via Telegram. But as negative as Telegram appears in the reporting at the moment – a large part of the content is legally compliant. In any case, communications expert Kettemann is against a ban on the app, and podcast host Michel Abdollahi replies: “We don’t want to live in a state that bans an entire platform just because it does not meet its obligations. […] 90-95 percent of the content is completely unproblematic. That would be a terrible unconstitutional by-catch. ”