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The EU is putting additional pressure on Telegram, after one of its member countries, France, arrested the platform’s co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov.
The EU has launched an investigation into the number of users the platform has in the bloc, and whether the number reported by Telegram is correct.
The importance of this is the EU’s ability to censor using the Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies services with over 45 million users.
In February, Telegram said that their number is 41 million, but the EU has chosen precisely this moment to start looking for ways to determine if this reporting was accurate – or, more likely, try to prove that it isn’t.
The EU Commission’s Joint Research Center is tasked with the job, while there are “ongoing talks with the app” regarding the way it arrived at its figure, the Financial Times writes, without expanding on the “ongoing talks” point.
EU Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier is quoted as saying that the EU “has a way” to determine whether Telegram’s reporting is true, using “our own systems and calculations.”
If the result of the investigation is that Telegram had lied, that is, that the number of users is 45 million or more – the EU will “unilaterally” declare it a very large platform, subject to the sweeping censorship rules contained in the DSA.
Saying that the decision can be made unilaterally and based only on the EU’s own investigation using its own agency to audit these figures means that the bloc is giving itself the right to, in an untransparent way, declare a platform the subject of the DSA.
One of DSA’s key purposes is to enforce the EU’s policy of even more tightly controlling the social media space, and a provision in the law states that those considered to be very large platforms must “disclose” what they are doing to counter “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
The Financial Times says that globally, Telegram has close to 1 billion users, with Asia as the largest market, and that in an interview with the publication earlier in 2024, Durov said the number of users is “roughly proportionate” with the size of different markets or continents.
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