After Parler’s removal from the App Store earlier this month, a Washington-based nonprofit group sued Apple last Sunday asking the company to ban the popular Telegram messaging app from its platform.
First reported by Washington Post, the Coalition for a Safer Web group argues that Telegram has become a place for extremists to spread their ideas on the web.
The lawsuit was filed by the Coalition for a Safer Web, a non-partisan group that advocates technologies and policies to remove extremist content from social media, and coalition president Marc Ginsberg, former US ambassador to Morocco.
According to the lawsuit, the non-partisan group accuses Telegram of hosting conversations by “white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hateful content”, which would be considered a violation of the App Store’s terms of service. A similar lawsuit will be filed against Google in the coming days.
The lawsuit was filed in the United States 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 allowing users to share content that incites violence without filters, and Apple has banned the iOS app, claiming that the app represents “threats of violence and illegal activities”.
Although Telegram is a messaging app, it also offers channels and public groups that users can access via a shareable URL or using the app’s built-in search. It is not yet clear whether Apple will ban Telegram from the App Store, but Telegram founder Pavel Durov has already mentioned that they are “working on a feature-rich web application that will run on Safari” in the event that Apple does ban the iOS app.
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