Telegram app logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 27, 2024. PHOTO/REUTERS
elegram might pale in comparison to WhatsApp, at least in the books of many Ugandans, but the messaging app has been in the news this past week following the arrest of its Russian-born founder, Pavel Durov.
Mr Durov, 39, who has French citizenship, was arrested last Saturday in Paris before being charged with allowing criminal activity to flourish on Telegram. Some of the illicit content frowned upon on the Telegram service includes exchange of child sexual imagery, drug trafficking and fraud.
Does the alleged complicity in the spread of illicit content impact Uganda in any way?
In a sense it does. There is empirical evidence that points to a proliferation of escort services on the messaging app. Escorts Uganda, for one, lists all escort services in the country. With an anonymous admin running the rule over the group, and making it terribly difficult to append personal liability, a great deal of the goings-on in Escorts Uganda fall foul of the line between what is acceptable and what is not.
Besides the age of the call girls being a toss-up, a great deal of the activities that the Telegram group propagates send red flags flying if Chapter XIII on offences against morality in the Penal Code Act is followed to the letter.
What is the other side of the coin, if any?
With around one billion users under its belt, it is easy to see why the criminal liability of Telegram has come into sharp focus. There are, however, fears that authoritarian and hybrid regimes across the globe could use the travails of Mr Durov to justify brazen acts of government censorship.
For instance, Facebook has been banned in Uganda since January 2021 after President Museveni took exception to the social network’s perceived “arrogance.”
There are fears that governments, such as Mr Museveni’s, will point to the treatment of Mr Durov to justify the curbs that they bring in on free speech. They will doubtless say cracking down on social media is not unusual since it is something that rich nations from the global north do.
So where do we go from here?
Observers say the absolutist views that Mr Durov has when it comes to free speech should be taken with a pinch of salt. This is not least because other messaging services like Facebook’s parent company Meta have spent a princely sum of money to police illegal content on their platforms. In a statement last Sunday, Telegram said “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
The messaging app also added that it “had nothing to hide.” As for its popularity, it remains to be seen if Mr Durov’s brush with the law impacts negatively on it.
Telegram offers considerably more social networking features than most messaging apps. Its group chats are, for instance, famed for being unlimited in size.
