Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, just put out a statement saying why Brazil Supreme Court is now suspending the app and the reason is incredible. As in the statement, he says that it was because the company was checking the wrong email address.
Pavel Durov said that they had an issue with emails going between their telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. The company did ask the court to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address but the court didn’t do that, and instead, they kept using the old general-purpose email address, Telegram missed these emails and now they’re getting banned unless the court takes pity.
The company says that they found those emails Which meant that these old email addresses did work, which makes it even more bizarre that these emails got missed. The company is trying to make sense of the situation with the court as there is a lot of political context surrounding the ban, As there are a lot of acquisitions saying that Telegram facilitates the spread of misinformation. But at the end of the day, it’s just an issue that Telegram faced, just the way we do (And that is checking our email)
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 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.
