Telegram Gets Banned in Brazil

The Supreme Court of Brazil has banned the Telegram in the country. On Friday, Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Internet providers and digital companies to ban messaging apps nationwide for failing to comply with orders from Brazilian authorities to remove messages containing disinformation.

This move happens when President Jair Bolsonaro is reportedly encouraging his base to follow him on Telegram as he prepares to run again in October. 

After the closure in Brazil, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov issued a statement stating that his Telegram was banned because it checked the wrong email address.

He said, “It seems that we had an issue with emails going on between telegram.org corporate addresses and 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." 

The CEO has also urged the court to consider delaying its ruling. He further said, “ We compiled with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, the 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.”