This is what idealism does to you.
Hmm today we will openly, defiantly, and unambiguously break the law.
Hmm we’ve gotten a legal demand to stop and a lawsuit, they say if we stop, apologize and promise never to do it again they’ll settle for a pittance but we are taking a moral stand here and believe our moral philosophical arguments hold more weight than the law as written that clearly places us unambiguously in violation of the law.
Court proceeds to ignore their philosophical arguments and enforce bourgeois law as written
This was beyond obvious as the outcome. Bourgeois courts don’t serve some public interest.
So instead now we stand to lose an invaluable, irreplaceable archive of not just the internet over decades of time but also rare media such as movies, TV shows, music videos, and much more all also archived with them. And for what? Because someone couldn’t back down and thought that courts in the US served the common interest instead of the wealthy. Because someone forgot the golden rule of piracy and breaking IP laws and that’s keep quiet about it.
They’re going to plug the NSA/GCHQ/eyes into Telegram and they’re never going to leave. They’re going to start altering content, using their access to arrest anti-imperialist activists, shut down anti-imperialist speech as “Russian disinfo” or whatever, etc, etc.
If you for some reason use Telegram for organizing, or even just for distributing anti-imperialist memes and info please move it elsewhere ASAP or at least prepare and spread info about a backup elsewhere.
Unfortunately this may proceed a very harsh cut-off of info from Russian sources as this was the last readily available in the west tool that also fully functioned in Russia. I don’t know if westerners can sign up for VK or whatever else the Russian replacement is likely to be. With their control of this they can sever a major artery of info from Russian sources (private, amateur, and government) to the west about the truth in Ukraine and elsewhere. It feels increasingly like total information control. The closing of a bubble, the removal of pesky alternative sources of info, the criminalization and harassment of RT employees and anyone else connected with a country like Russia (or China).
And you can bet despite all this talk there will still be plenty of pedos channels on Telegram for without getting booted (they’ll bust a few of the big ones and make a big show of how this was possible thanks to the arrest and compromising Telegram then probably go back to ignoring them in favor of information manipulation, passing info on enemies to western intel for additional targeting with malware, etc). And there will probably be an increase in amounts of tolerated terrorists targeting Russia and China on the app who aren’t taken down despite requests from those countries.