Telegram was evading emails from Brazilian authorities for months, until mid-March this year, when the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled to ban the application over misinformation concerns ahead of the country’s elections. Two days later, Telegram complied with the court’s requests, which included deleting a few of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s posts and suspending the account of one of his prominent acolytes.
The court rescinded its embargo and not long after, Telegram and the Brazilian Electoral Court signed a cooperation agreement. Telegram indicated it would create a communication channel between itself and the court to receive reports on election disinformation and the app will now flag posts that have false information related to the elections.
Fact-checkers in the region have reacted with both skepticism and hope toward Telegram’s new signaling on matters of information spread.
“The agreement with the TSE (the Portuguese acronym for the Brazilian court) seems like a good first step from a tech company that, until a few months ago, didn't even answer court orders from Brazil. I believe it is positive to cooperate with the electoral authorities and to signal misinformation about the elections, but we still have no clue on how Telegram will act on disinformation spread by candidates,” said Bernardo Barbosa, assistant editor at UOL Confere, a fact-checking outlet and verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles.
“They are addressing the problem of tackling misinformation as a legal or justice (department) issue and not as a product problem,” said Natália Leal, the CEO of Agência Lupa, another IFCN verified signatory, fact-checking and news outlet in Brazil. “They don’t have any kind of monitoring tool; they don’t want to develop it. They want us to do the monitoring work, but they want to control the scope of monitoring.”
Facebook also collaborates with fact-checking organizations and built an infrastructure around giving fact-checkers greater access and tools for analysis to tackle misinformation. On Facebook, fact-checkers can use an in-house platform to view trends, ways content is spreading on the platform and numerical information about viral posts. Though Leal also stated misgivings about Facebook, she said the platform was better overall for fact-checkers than Telegram.
“They don’t want to develop any kind of tool like how we have with Facebook for the Third-Party Fact-Checking Program,” Leal said. “We have the same access that any user has. You can download some numbers and some information from Telegram. It’s open, but it doesn’t mean it’s usable. It feels like they are not taking things seriously.”
Additionally, Telegram has been pushy in its correspondence with some fact-checking organizations, placing conditions on agreements that the organizations must sign by the end of the day while protracting its own response time to outlets’ communications, Leal said.
“In my opinion, Telegram should define a misinformation policy before taking any step forward, and make this policy clear for all users. We don't want to start to work with Telegram and have a target on our back because users do not have knowledge or are not being informed about the new rules of the platform regarding misinformation,” Leal said.
Telegram has also suggested fact-checking organizations will be limited in the number of channels in which they can do work, according to Leal.
“They want to say, ‘Lupa, you monitor these 20 channels and you cannot monitor any channel that Aos Fatos is monitoring,’” Leal said of Telegram. Aos Fatos is another prominent Brazilian fact-checking and news outlet.
Fact-checkers at Aos Fatos could not say much about recent developments with Telegram, having already signed nondisclosure agreements with the tech company.
Telegram did not respond to the International Fact-Checking Network’s multiple requests for comment.
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