not “misinformation, social engineering, and mass data collection platform masquerading as a social media platform”
Yeah and what do you think Russia for example sees almost every American “communiction platform” as? And it’s not as if they don’t have a reason, like every american platform that is every other major social media that isn’t tiktok is censored, controlled and swarming with bots doing narrative control and spam. It really is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy to say that TiKTok is the real pressing problem. I don’t even use TikTok, but I find it so fucking disgusting how every “freespeech freedomlover” comes out of the woodwork to demand it’s shutting it down just to enforce American social media monopoly over the world. Even if Bytedance has bent over backwards to prove that there isn’t any misconduct (of things that US based tech companies are routinely mandated to do for US gov, state department and the intelligence services), because it’s only bad if somebody else does the excact same thing to us as we would have done to them.
They primarily want it shut down because it has enabled citizen journalism that they can’t control and that is a threat to status quo. Not because people can sell drugs, do money laundering, organize terrorism or share cp on there, that’s just the excuse for it. Like it has been for every outreach against privacy and freedom of information.
Ukraine and palestine have probably been the main motivator for this push against telegram. Like Russians can share it’s view of the war to almost a billion eye pairs. Western media and adjacent political power and institutions have awoken to the fact and find it untenable when they can’t enforce media and information blockade on people. It’s not even about the western population since telegram is much more popular in the third world that it’s in the west.