No.

If Telegram was a social media company with algorithmic content recommendation systems, you could argue it was penalizing one side in favor of the other one. If that was the case I'd agree with you but it's not the case. Telegram is a messaging app, like signal and whatsapp. Its users are the ones doing the influencing, not the company itself.

The election is already over anyway. This episode is just Lula and his people making good on his campaign promise to "regulate" the internet by censoring it.

> > Telegram itself sent a message to all its brazilian users speaking out against the censorship law they're trying to pass.

> Its users are the ones doing the influencing, not the company itself.

I don't think those can both be true.

Mind you, I'm not on Brazil's side here. I'm just saying that your two statements seem contradictory.

I don't think they did anything of the sort during the elections. Only now that the brazilian government is trying to pass laws that could very well drive them out of the country did they make their own position clear.

This has also happened to WhatsApp by the way. Judges blocked WhatsApp nation wide for days because it failed to provide plain text user messages in a criminal investigation. Zuckerberg posted his opinion about it on Facebook.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining. (I don't follow Brazil enough to have understood the sequence there.)

> Its users are the ones doing the influencing, not the company itself.

That is absolutely not true. Telegram the company itself (not a user or users) mass-sent the propaganda message to all users of the platform in the country. That is a chilling overstep by a company that is supposed to be a neutral carrier.

It was true during the elections. At no point during the elections did Telegram send a message to users favoring one candidate or another.

Openly making statements is different than subversive methods of manipulation. Telegram wasn't lying either, it's just an opinion

Pffft, what? No it isn’t. What a ludicrous thing to say.

Telegram may not be some shining paragon of freedom, but it seems pretty obvious that Brazil (like many other nations) is shifting towards naked despotism.

It’s a bad response to a real and bad problem that I’m afraid there’s no good ( practical ) solution.

The misinformation and populist propaganda is those platforms, it’s so spread out that has real world consequences. That’s why the current powers have to acknowledge the problem.

The world views and “post-democracy” stuff spread by ( mostly) Russian and Chinese operations are wild!! And they are sophisticated enough to craft their message to different parts of the world. ( in Europe and the Us, is posts fomenting racial divisions) the other parts of the world as far as I can tell it’s how the West it’s bad, controls everything and turns your son gay.

The solution? I don’t know. Probably none.