🇺🇸 An anonymous account named "Crémieux Recueil" is a big deal in tech circles on Twitter. Both Elon Musk and Garry Tan have subscriptions to him; Investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Snrivasan and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen-Horowitz have both interacted with him on the platform.
The account regularly promotes race science, eugenics, and other pseudoscientific ideas that are considered fringe even among the far-right.
🇺🇸 An anonymous account named "Crémieux Recueil" is a big deal in tech circles on Twitter. Both Elon Musk and Garry Tan have subscriptions to him; Investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Snrivasan and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen-Horowitz have both interacted with him on the platform.
The account regularly promotes race science, eugenics, and other pseudoscientific ideas that are considered fringe even among the far-right.
The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Telegram has become more interventionist over time, and has steadily increased its efforts to shut down these accounts. But this has also meant that the company has also engaged with lawmakers more generally, although it maintains that it doesn’t do so willingly. For instance, in September 2021, Telegram reportedly blocked a chat bot in support of (Putin critic) Alexei Navalny during Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections. Pavel Durov was quoted at the time saying that the company was obliged to follow a “legitimate” law of the land. He added that as Apple and Google both follow the law, to violate it would give both platforms a reason to boot the messenger from its stores. But Kliuchnikov, the Ukranian now in France, said he will use Signal or WhatsApp for sensitive conversations, but questions around privacy on Telegram do not give him pause when it comes to sharing information about the war. Russians and Ukrainians are both prolific users of Telegram. They rely on the app for channels that act as newsfeeds, group chats (both public and private), and one-to-one communication. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Telegram has remained an important lifeline for both Russians and Ukrainians, as a way of staying aware of the latest news and keeping in touch with loved ones. So, uh, whenever I hear about Telegram, it’s always in relation to something bad. What gives?
from ca
