A statement from Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov explains why Brazil’s Supreme Court has suspended the service, and it’s amazing. According to Durov’s statement, the error occurred because his organization was checking the incorrect email address. You can read the complete explanation below or on Durov’s Telegram channel.
“It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court,” Durov says, going on to explain that his company asked the court to send future takedown requests “to a dedicated email address.” But the court didn’t do that, apparently — it kept using “the old general-purpose email address,” and Telegram missed them somehow, and now it’s getting banned unless the court takes pity.
The corporation claims to have located the emails (implying that the old address worked, which makes it even weirder that the emails somehow got missed) and is working with the court to resolve the matter… In this report, my colleague Adi Robertson lays out the political context surrounding the ban, which derives from allegations that Telegram aids the spread of disinformation. Telegram, on the other hand, sees it as a solution to a problem that we all face: keeping track of emails.
It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.
On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.
We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.
Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends, and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.
The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable channel of communication is established, we’ll be able to efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil
