Telegram has limited access to channels associated with the Hamas movement in an effort to reduce the group’s impact on the internet, following pressure from critics amid the ongoing conflict.
The platform has blocked access to the official channel of Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the organization, on the Android operating system, it remains unclear whether Telegram has taken similar action on the iOS system.
When attempting to access these channels, a message appears stating, “Unfortunately, this channel cannot be displayed on Telegram applications downloaded from the Google Play Store.”
However, other channels related to Hamas, such as “Gaza Now,” which has over 1.6 million subscribers, remain accessible on Telegram.
The state-owned Russian media agency TASS had previously announced this development, Telegram blamed the ban on guidelines from Google’s app store, according to a report published by The Jerusalem Post.
Notably, Hamas launched a significant and unprecedented attack on Israeli settlements on October 7, the largest of its kind in decades, leading to an escalation of violence in the region.
Social media companies have faced significant pressure to combat the spread of misleading information and propaganda during conflicts, similar to what occurred after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Tech giants such as Meta, Google, Twitter, and Elon Musk’s social media company, now known as “X,” faced similar pressures to suppress propaganda and misleading information supporting Russia on their platforms.
The European Union has issued several warnings to companies like “X” and Meta, cautioning them that they may face investigations and potential sanctions under the Digital Services Act, a critical part of the regulatory framework requiring tech companies to remove illegal and harmful content from their platforms if they fail to do so.
This falls short of adequately addressing the misleading information surrounding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, previously resisted calls to remove Hamas accounts from the app, emphasizing that the group was a significant source of information about the war.
In a post dated October 13, Durov stated that the platform’s moderators and artificial intelligence tools remove millions of posts related to the war daily, posts that are “undoubtedly harmful.” However, he added that “addressing war-related coverage is rarely straightforward.”
Durov mentioned in the post that Hamas had previously “used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area before their rocket attacks.”
He questioned, “Will closing their channel save lives, or will it put more lives in danger? While it would be easy for us to destroy this information source, doing so risks worsening an already bad situation.
